Walking through the newly renovated rooms of the Hôtel de Marle, one's gaze lingers on monumental canvases, urban fragments resembling silent musical scores. It is here, in this architectural setting restored with almost archaeological precision, that the first French retrospective of Barbro Östlihn (1930-1995) unfolds, presented at the Swedish Institute from March 28 to July 20, 2025.
The artist, little known to the general public yet a discreet pillar of the American and European avant-gardes, developed an unclassifiable pictorial language. Neither entirely pop nor completely abstract, her art is rooted in walls, urban solitude, and interstices. When she arrived in New York in 1961 with her husband Öyvind Fahlström, she settled in Rauschenberg's former loft in Lower Manhattan. A place where creation seemed to resonate within the walls.
“She was fascinated by the architecture of cities, by what buildings tell us without speaking,” explains curator Annika Öhrner. By day, Barbro photographs. By night, she paints. It is not crowds that captivate her, but fixed structures: scaffolding, factories, gas stations, buildings identified by their address.
His style is made up of decomposed geometric forms, abstract mosaics, muted colors, and plays on scale. The works on display—some twenty large-format pieces and a collection of photographs, sketches, and archival documents—trace a sensitive trajectory from New York to Paris via Stockholm.
In the exhibition, the canvases "Gas Station" (1963) and "Pantbank" (1962) appear as metaphorical cross-sections of a city that she dissects without ever dramatizing it. One thinks of the rigor of Donald Judd, the melancholy of Hopper, without Östlihn ever seeming to claim any particular movement. She exists elsewhere, in a poetry of the fragment, where silence speaks for itself.
“What struck me was his ability to translate architecture into sensation,” continues Annika Öhrner. Indeed, for Östlihn, the relationship to the urban landscape is a form of intimate reflection: the city as a mirror of the self, as a projection surface for an inhabited solitude. His work resonates particularly strongly today, at a time when artists are once again questioning the boundaries between the intimate and the monumental.
From 1963 onwards, she exhibited in renowned galleries in New York. She collaborated with Fahlström on group projects, participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and associated with Donald Judd, Barbara Rose, Marian Goodman, and others. Yet, she remained in the shadows. Her trajectory seems guided by a deliberate discretion, a distance from the machinations of the official art world.
When the couple separated, she moved to Paris in 1976 and continued her work there with quiet consistency. Her canvases became more abstract, but retained her obsession with the frame, the wall, and the architectural motif. Represented by the Baudoin Lebon gallery, she continues to explore the memory of places through painting.
Today, the perception of Barbro Östlihn is changing. In Sweden, the major exhibition at the Moderna Museet in 1984 initiated a reappraisal. France, however, is discovering him. This retrospective, organized in a Swedish institute that was itself at the heart of Franco-Swedish artistic exchanges in the 20th century, acts as a gentle redress.
In a subtle yet revealing parallel, the exhibition engages in a dialogue with the presentation of Pontus Hultén's graphic objects at the Grand Palais, as if these two visions of post-war European art were responding to each other from a distance. Both share the same desire to transcend boundaries, to build bridges between disciplines, between countries, between perspectives.
The Swedish Institute's exhibition invites us to reconsider the notion of a masterpiece: here, the monument is discreet, the revolution silent. And it is precisely this restraint that is so moving, that leaves a lasting impression.
Barbro Östlihn
March 28 – July 20, 2025
Swedish Institute, 11 rue Payenne, Paris 3rd arrondissement
