Mamma Andersson

Texts by Kim Levin, Midori Matsui, Lars Nittve, Lars Norén, and Ann-Sofi Noring

The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with dreams, fairy tales, and the details of everyday life. Her passion for storytelling means that every dark maelstrom is scattered with structuring elements: a window, a television, someone looking at a painting. Her early works feature children in vast landscapes, forests, lakes and countryside that echo her own childhood in northern Sweden, (she was born in Luleå in 1962). In later pieces, this rural setting yields to the interiors of the art world–cluttered framers’s workshops, libraries, and elegant salons. Most recently, these rooms have opened up towards new realms, where the finely ornamented objects from Andersson’s gallery scenes seem at home, dreamlike, in the wilderness, with paintings hanging from snowy mountains. Whatever her motifs, the atmosphere is always one of serenity and wonder, a moment of appreciation between finding and forgetting. Today, Andersson is one of Sweden’s most internationally recognized artists, with recent solo exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. She represented her country at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was also featured at the 2004 Berlin Biennial and the Sydney Biennial, 2006.