550. BARBRO ÖSTLIHN. “270 Water Street (Warehouse)”.
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Description
Oil on canvas, 214 x 99 cm. Executed in 1965
PROVENANCE
Barbro Östlihn
Private Ownership
EXHIBITED
Gothenburg Museum of Art, “Barbro Östlhn. New York Imprint”, 12 March—25 September 2022.
Västerås Art Museum, “Barbro Östlhn. New York Imprint”, October 15 - March 5, 2023.
Liljevalchs, “Barbro Östlhn. New York Imprint”, June 16 — September 3, 2023.
LITERATURE
Annika Öhrner, “Barbro Östlhn and New York: the spaces and possibilities of art”, p. 249.
Per Dahlström, “Barbro Östlhn, New York Imprint”, exhibition catalogue Göteborgs Konstmuseum 2022, illustrated full page p. 36.
Barbro Östlihn's painting must be regarded as one of the most interesting and important of the 20th century of late modernism. At just over 30 years old, she moved to New York in the early 1960s with her new husband Öyvind Fahlström. There she achieved great success with solo exhibitions, including at Cordier & Ekstrom, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery. She had a unique talent for painting and was very well received by the new circle of friends including Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Donald Judd, the latter also as one of the leading art critics.
In his work Barbro Östlhn became unbreakably faithful to oil painting. She was, after several years at Konstfack and the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, immensely technologically driven and among New York's buildings with its unique architecture she found the circle of motifs, the painterly language, that would follow her in the following decades and which she consistently developed to mastery. Her many walks in the new city with her Kodak were exhilarating and the photographs of New York's facades became the starting point of the new paintings. This architectural orientation is based on one of the most difficult things in painting; the gentle displacement of color from light to shadow without it being really noticeable, without any visible contrasting transitions. Such committed, serious, and talented painting attracted justifiable respect and attention in New York and later in Paris.
The art of Eastern Liechtenstein is difficult to categorize as her paintings do not correspond to any clear direction at the time. The strictly geometric and symmetrical structure also resembles nothing we have seen before. Her goal was not to reduce reality to geometric basic forms, but to find the character of the forms. Östlinh's artistry is unusually consistent with recurring motifs and techniques reminiscent of colored linen damask, where squares and rectangles depict themselves in the contrast between a shiny and a matte surface.
270 Water Street is located in the southern part of Manhattan, near the financial district. The building, which formerly housed a button factory, still retains its four floors above the ground floor, the windows of which Östlhn has so meticulously reproduced in the painting of the same name. Like other works of art from the 1960s, Östlhn has chosen the large format and symmetrical forms. But here is the transition towards the more mosaic works that become prominent in the 1970s. In Östlinh's art, control and vitality meet, a subtle duality that few other artists master.
Condition
Generally stable paint layer. Easily marked plane defects partly along the edges of the wedge frame and partly locally over the surface. Less chafing along the edges of the work as well as minder retouches.
For questions, please contact victoria.svederberg@auktionsverket.com.
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Description
Oil on canvas, 214 x 99 cm. Executed in 1965
PROVENANCE
Barbro Östlihn
Private Ownership
EXHIBITED
Gothenburg Museum of Art, “Barbro Östlhn. New York Imprint”, 12 March—25 September 2022.
Västerås Art Museum, “Barbro Östlhn. New York Imprint”, October 15 - March 5, 2023.
Liljevalchs, “Barbro Östlhn. New York Imprint”, June 16 — September 3, 2023.
LITERATURE
Annika Öhrner, “Barbro Östlhn and New York: the spaces and possibilities of art”, p. 249.
Per Dahlström, “Barbro Östlhn, New York Imprint”, exhibition catalogue Göteborgs Konstmuseum 2022, illustrated full page p. 36.
Barbro Östlihn's painting must be regarded as one of the most interesting and important of the 20th century of late modernism. At just over 30 years old, she moved to New York in the early 1960s with her new husband Öyvind Fahlström. There she achieved great success with solo exhibitions, including at Cordier & Ekstrom, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery. She had a unique talent for painting and was very well received by the new circle of friends including Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Donald Judd, the latter also as one of the leading art critics.
In his work Barbro Östlhn became unbreakably faithful to oil painting. She was, after several years at Konstfack and the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, immensely technologically driven and among New York's buildings with its unique architecture she found the circle of motifs, the painterly language, that would follow her in the following decades and which she consistently developed to mastery. Her many walks in the new city with her Kodak were exhilarating and the photographs of New York's facades became the starting point of the new paintings. This architectural orientation is based on one of the most difficult things in painting; the gentle displacement of color from light to shadow without it being really noticeable, without any visible contrasting transitions. Such committed, serious, and talented painting attracted justifiable respect and attention in New York and later in Paris.
The art of Eastern Liechtenstein is difficult to categorize as her paintings do not correspond to any clear direction at the time. The strictly geometric and symmetrical structure also resembles nothing we have seen before. Her goal was not to reduce reality to geometric basic forms, but to find the character of the forms. Östlinh's artistry is unusually consistent with recurring motifs and techniques reminiscent of colored linen damask, where squares and rectangles depict themselves in the contrast between a shiny and a matte surface.
270 Water Street is located in the southern part of Manhattan, near the financial district. The building, which formerly housed a button factory, still retains its four floors above the ground floor, the windows of which Östlhn has so meticulously reproduced in the painting of the same name. Like other works of art from the 1960s, Östlhn has chosen the large format and symmetrical forms. But here is the transition towards the more mosaic works that become prominent in the 1970s. In Östlinh's art, control and vitality meet, a subtle duality that few other artists master.
Condition
Generally stable paint layer. Easily marked plane defects partly along the edges of the wedge frame and partly locally over the surface. Less chafing along the edges of the work as well as minder retouches.
For questions, please contact victoria.svederberg@auktionsverket.com.
Resale right
Do you have something similar to sell? Get your items valued free of charge!
