Öyvind Fahlström

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Öyvind Fahlström—a nomadic luminary born in the humid sprawl of São Paulo and destined for the Baltic chill of Stockholm—has long languished in the footnotes of art history. Critics tethered him to the neon-drenched coat-tails of European Pop Art, yet such labeling feels like describing a tempest as a mere breeze. Beneath his aesthetic appropriation of mass-media static and the grimy undercurrents of counter-culture, Fahlström’s oeuvre throbs with a labyrinthine moral urgency; it is less a collection of objects than a rigorous, intellectual siege against complacency. This meticulously curated exhibition bridges the chasm between archival silences and public reception, pulling over seventy disparate artifacts from the shadows of private vaults. Much of this assembly draws its bracing, unfiltered vitality from the artist’s own personal caches, recently entrusted to the custodianship of the MACBA. To engage with Fahlström is to abandon … Read more

Carl Andre, 2 new additions

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Born in the granite-crusted soil of Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1935, Carl Andre emerged as a sculptural iconoclast, shedding the pretensions of high art like a snake sloughing its winter skin. His trajectory was forged not in the sterile vacuum of the academy, but amidst the industrial grit of gear works and the rhythmic, iron-lunged roar of the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he served as a brakesman. These years amidst the switchbacks proved seminal; the utilitarian cadence of locomotives bled into his aesthetic, transmuted into the rigid geometry of his later output. Andre’s transition from the gestural—his nascent poems and ethereal perspex incisions—to the tectonic was absolute. Influenced profoundly by the stripped-down essence of Brancusi and the chromatic austerity of his confidant, Frank Stella, Andre redirected his focus. Carving became anachronism; construction, his new … Read more

Irma Boom

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The first blog “new Style ” is dedicated to arguably the most influential book designer from the last 3 decades from the Netherlands. Irma Boom started designing books right after she had left the AKI; yet, her definitive refinement occurred during a half-decade tenure navigating the bureaucratic currents of the Dutch government’s printing house. In 1991, she birthed Irma Boom Office—a boutique studio that functions much like an alchemist’s workshop, distilling complex cultural narratives into physical form for a global clientele spanning from the … Read more