With a consistent and purposeful style of painting, she carved out a space for herself in the New York art world, working from the fall of 1961 on Front Street in a studio she shared with her husband Öyvind Fahlström. Östlihn painted the flat surfaces and architecture of urban space. She based her work on photographs that she had taken during long walks and translated them into paintings.
The exhibition title, New York Imprint, thus points to how New York is reflected in Östlihn’s work in several ways. She has a recurring interest in the imprints of buildings on the remaining facades of a changing New York. She also had an intuitive attention to the new painting that was being formulated by her colleagues in the ‘neo-avant-garde’ around Manhattan. The particular intensity of city life, art life and the studios there became crucial to her painting throughout her career.
Long after her death, Barbro Östlihn had no real place in Swedish art history, but today she is increasingly recognized as one of the most important Swedish artists of the late 20th century. Her career was more international than Swedish. In the 1960s she commuted between Stockholm and New York, where she had solo exhibitions at some of the most important galleries. From the mid-1970s she lived in Paris and continued the same path there, developing an increasingly abstract style of painting.
Liljevalchs konsthall now presents the first large-scale exhibition in Stockholm of Barbro Östlihn’s paintings since 1983, when Moderna Museet presented a retrospective. A larger exhibition of the artist was presented by Norrköping Art Museum in 2003. Barbro Östlihn. New York Imprint, is produced by Göteborgs konstmuseum. Curators are Per Dahlström in collaboration with Annika Öhrner, associate professor of art history, who is also responsible for the selection of works and presentation at Liljevalchs.
