Barbro Östlihn

Pop Art’s architectural painter.

Barbro Östlihn painted façades and structures in New York and Paris in austere, sharp-edged forms. She was married to Öyvind Fahlström.

Barbro Östlihn was born in 1930 and trained as an artist in Stockholm in the 1950s. In 1960 she married Öyvind Fahlström, and the following year they moved to New York. There they lived in a large studio building in Manhattan and moved in the circle around Robert Rauschenberg and other artists at the heart of Pop Art.

In New York she found her main subject: the façades of buildings. She painted windows, brick walls, rows of panes and steel structures, often on a large scale and with austere, sharp edges. The pictures are built up like abstract patterns but start from real buildings and structures. They have affinities both with Pop Art’s interest in the urban environment and with geometric abstraction. Later she also painted façades and structures in Paris.

For many years she stood in the shadow of her better-known husband, but she was an independent artist with a clear direction of her own.

Barbro Östlihn died in 1995. Her art has received renewed attention in recent years, and she is now regarded as one of the most interesting Swedish painters of the 1960s. Her works are held by Moderna Museet, among others.

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