Öyvind Fahlström

Öyvind Fahlström
Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The games and the maps.

Öyvind Fahlström made movable picture games and political maps of the Cold War. He worked in New York and is counted among the most important Swedish Pop artists.

Öyvind Fahlström was born in 1928 in São Paulo, Brazil. His father was Norwegian and his mother Swedish. In 1939 he was sent to relatives in Sweden, and when the Second World War broke out he stayed on. He studied art history at Stockholm University College and worked as a journalist and critic. In 1953 he wrote one of the world’s first manifestos of concrete poetry.

His first major work was the painting Ade-Ledic-Nander II of 1955–57, a large picture full of small, sign-like and comic-like figures playing a kind of game across the surface. It is in Moderna Museet. In 1961 he moved to New York with the artist Barbro Östlihn, to whom he was married, and there he became part of the Pop Art circle.

Fahlström wanted the viewer to take part. He made variable paintings in which sheet-metal figures are held in place by magnets and can be moved, so that the picture changes like a game. He liked to borrow from comics, newspaper pictures and advertising. Over time his art became increasingly political. He made detailed world maps and diagrams about the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the CIA and the world economy, and games parodying Monopoly in which the players could buy dictators and raw materials.

He also worked in theatre, happenings, film and radio, and he represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 1966. He moved freely between Stockholm and New York and was in touch with both American and Swedish artists.

Fahlström died of cancer in Stockholm in 1976, aged just 47. He is regarded as one of the most international and innovative Swedish artists of the 20th century, and his way of combining games, politics and images has gained renewed relevance in our age of information overload.