ÖYVIND FAHLSTRÖM 
São Paulo, (Brazil) 1928 – Estocolmo,(Sweden) 1976  

After spending his childhood in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, he acquired Swedish nationality in 1947. In Stockholm he combined his studies of art history and archaeology with intense activity as a poet, critic and chronicler of cultural themes. The publication of his “Manifest for konkret poesi” (Manifesto for Concrete Poetry) in 1953 was followed by the presentation of his first work, Opera, which he defined as a “signifiguration”, at the Galleria Numero in Florence. In it one can already see the world of signs that reached a paroxysm in Ade-Ledic-Nander, a series in a style of variegated abstraction, created between 1954 and 1957 and described at the time as “spontaneist”, accompanied by complex texts that explained the genealogy of the various elements represented. In 1959 he exhibited at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris for the first time. 
In 1961 he went to live in New York and embarked on an frenetic period of activity, diversifying into many different fields of creativity: happenings, theatre and novels. In his art he began to slim down his exuberant imagery, which led to an exploration of concepts such as movement and change in his works. These themes were resolved in his first “variable paintings” in 1962, the year of his inclusion in New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and they were refined in 1966 in his “variable multiples”, in which there were cut-out objects, attached by magnets, that altered the internal structure of the work. In 1966 he also made Roulette, his first painting in oils on a photograph, and Mao-Hope-march, his first short 16-mm film. He continued this experiment the following year, making various anti-war films for Swedish television, culminating in 1969 with the full-length film Du Gamla Du Fria (Provocation). In the second half of the decade his work was included in various significant argumentative exhibitions, such as Pictures to be Read/Poetry to be Seen (Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, 1967), Spirit of Comics (Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, 1969), Art and Technology (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970). The irony and profound political content in his work appeared explicitly in his last creations, in which he adopted the aesthetics and structure of the game Monopoly in order to explore his concept of variation.