Barbro Ostlihn at Tibor de Nagy Gallery shows a group of meticulous symmetrically composed oils slightly obsessive in their treatment of recognizable objects in an unlikely scale and fiercely anal-compulsive in their elaborately titty-pooed renderings.
Dahlia presents a huge image of this flower, hovering just clear of the limits of a square canvas. The countless scarlet petals glow to yellow at the edges, suggesting a scorching blossom of incandescent steel floating in its field of blue. 91 Allen Street has a Sheeleresque rendering of a complex hydrant-like form that elaborates itself into the semblance of a gingerbread architectural ornament of theatrical extravagance. Again, the image is symmetrical. More orthodox Surrealist imagery appears in 80 Pine Street, where wisps of Magritte clouds may be seen through a rectangular grid of lighter and darker blue-grey panes arranged in alternate rows. The pangs of infinity are evoked with as little mawkishness as possible.
The quadrilaterally symmetrical undulations of a fluttering Swedish Flag (Miss Ostlihn is Swedish) are shown as seen through one of those popular kaleidoscopic viewers. The arrested cellular division of the image does not subject the observer to any distressing wooziness. Miss Ostlihn’s most striking work is an aerial view, or rather colored plan, of the Park of the Royal Palace of Drottingholm. Here the subject itself is sufficiently grand that the artist’s large format does not seem merely a device to amplify a very dear little idea indeed. The design of the garden plan in the manner of Le Notre provides a great deal more variety of form and pleasing compositional elaboration than is the case with the other paintings in the show. Like a painted carpet the picture luxuriously sprawls out in abstract perfection. Freed from the vexatious necessity of coping with volumes and space that annoy Miss Ostlihn when tackling other subjects, here she tidily pins down and trivializes each detail of the amplitude of a great Baroque invention, just so.
—Dennis Adrian
