Walking through the newly renovated rooms of the Hôtel de Marle, one's gaze lingers on monumental canvases, urban fragments resembling silent scores. It is here, in this architectural setting restored with almost archaeological meticulousness, 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, has developed an unclassifiable pictorial language. Neither entirely pop nor totally abstract, her art is rooted in walls, urban solitudes 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 seems to resonate within the walls.
"She was fascinated by the architecture of cities, by what buildings tell without speaking," explains curator Annika Öhrner. By day, Barbro photographed. By night, she paints. It's not crowds that attract her attention, but fixed structures: scaffolding, factories, gas stations, buildings named by their address.
His style is one of decomposed geometric forms, abstract mosaics, muted colors and play on scale. The works on show - 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.
Dans l’exposition, les toiles “Gas Station” (1963) ou “Pantbank” (1962) apparaissent comme des plans de coupe métaphoriques d’une ville qu’elle décortique sans jamais la théâtraliser. On pense à la rigueur de Donald Judd, à la mélancolie de Hopper, sans que jamais Östlihn ne semble revendiquer un courant. Elle est ailleurs, dans une poésie du fragment, où le silence vaut manifeste.
"What struck me was his ability to translate architecture into sensation," continues Annika Öhrner. Indeed, Östlihn's relationship with 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. Her work is particularly relevant today, when artists are once again questioning the boundaries between the intimate and the monumental.
From 1963 onwards, she exhibited in renowned New York galleries. She collaborated with Fahlström on collective projects, took part in the 1966 Venice Biennale, frequented Donald Judd, Barbara Rose and Marian Goodman... Yet she remained in the shadows. Her trajectory seems guided by an assumed discretion, a distance from the games of official art.
When the couple split up, she returned to Paris in 1976, where she continued her work with silent constancy. Her canvases became more abstract, but retained her obsession with the frame, the wall and the architectural motif. She is represented by galerie baudoin lebon, and continues to question the memory of places through painting.
Today, the way Barbro Östlihn is viewed is changing. In Sweden, the major exhibition at Moderna Museet in 1984 initiated a new reading. France, on the other hand, is discovering her. This retrospective, organized in a Swedish Institute that was itself at the heart of twentieth-century Franco-Swedish artistic exchanges, acts as a gentle reparation.
In a discreet but revealing parallelism, the exhibition dialogues with the presentation of Pontus Hultén's graphic objects at the Grand Palais, as if these two visions of post-war artistic Europe were responding to each other from a distance. The same desire to transcend frameworks, to build bridges between disciplines, countries and points of view is evident.
The exhibition at the Swedish Institute is an invitation to reconsider the notion of the masterpiece: here, the monument is discreet, the revolution silent. And it is precisely this restraint that touches and leaves a lasting impression on the retina.
Barbro Östlihn
March 28 - July 20, 2025
Swedish Institute, 11 rue Payenne, Paris 3e
