Oyvind Fahlstrom at Sidney Janis - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The name Oyvind Fahlstrom too ofttimes draws a blank with American audiences, or, if tribe know the name, they have seen little of his work. This may be partly explained by dint of Fahlstrom's early death, in 1976 at the age of 48 and by means of his confusing nationality. Born in Brazil of Swedish and Norwegian parents, he was raised in the one and the other Brazil and Sweden but was based in of recent origin York after 1962. The situation is further complicated by means of the fact that the work he did during his years in novel York was unlike most of what was going upon around him. Despite his inclusion in the epochal 1962 "New Realist" display at Sidney Janis, which marked the emerging see the verb of American Pop art, and his friendship with Americans like Robert Rauschenberg, Fahlstrom's real affinity was with Gianfranco Baruchello, Herve Telemaque and Erro European artists level less familiar here than he was.

Fahlstrom's major work, from the mid-1960s to his death, was notable for the way it combined sum of two units generally exclusive concerns: politics and play. Perhaps solitary in the period leading up to May '68 was it possible to combine the sum of two units so effortlessly. Fahlstrom repeatedly used the visual language of children's toys, jigsaw mystifys and board games to carry a radical political message. With his "variable" paintings, like Sitting... 6 Month Later (1963) in which simple bodys were attached to the support by the agency of magnets so that the viewer could rearrange them, Fahlstrom spiritedly presaged the antiauthoritarian sentiments of the late '60s

In a 1971 work upon paper titled Notes 5 (Wrestlers) he adapted the convention of board games that assigns to each color a specific significance. ln this drawing, which also reveals Fahlstrom's liability to underground comics, the lock opener in the lower right corner computes us that green stands for the at liberty World, blue for the U.S.A., purple for Russia, fulvid for China and black and r for anarchism. In other works, Fahlstrom makes lively paintings that incorporate economic statistics. What's surprising is that smooth 20 years later much of Fahlstrom's political commentary--for instance, about the machinations of big industry in the Third World---still present the appearances relevant, even if his interest in Maoism and anarchism looks dated.

There was something encyclopedic about Fahlstrom's approach, evident not solitary in his taste for anticapitalist, anti-imperialist data. (What other painter would have feeling it important to tell you that foreign oil profits in Venezuela in the 1950 amounted to $5 billion?) His compositional strategy repeatedly involves arraying as many images as possible upon a page, using visual sources ranging from pre-Columbian codices to pinball machines to of advanced age Sears catalogues. The freshness I find in Fahlstrom is perhaps heightened through the similarity of his work to that of in every one's mouth painters like Jane Hammond and Trevor Winkfield. Like Fahlstrom, they, too are engaged in establishing a zany kind of order in our visually overcrowd world.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group