Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (b. 1962), on view at the gallery’s Paris location. Characterized by a unique combination of textured brushstrokes, loose washes, stark graphic lines, and evocative colors, Andersson’s works embody a new genre of painting that recalls late nineteenth-century Romanticism while embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions.

This is the artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery and follows her major 2021 solo presentation at the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark, and the two-person exhibition Tal R & Mamma Andersson – About Hill at the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark, in 2022–2023, which is traveling to Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden, and Museum MORE, Gorssel, the Netherlands, in 2023–2024.

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Image: Mamma Andersson, Armageddon, 2023 (detail)

Location

108, rue Vieille du Temple Paris France, 75003

Dates

October 16—November 18, 2023

Opening Reception

Monday, October 16, 6—8 PM

Gallery Hours

Tues—Sat 11am–7pm

Artist

Mamma Andersson

Adieu Maria Magdalena

Mamma Andersson at her studio in Stockholm, 2021. Photo by Mats Liliequist

Mamma Andersson at her studio in Stockholm, 2021. Photo by Mats Liliequist

“If you look at my earlier paintings, they often have a lot of narratives overlapping in different layers, almost like a teen who wants to tell about everything at once. I guess I wanted to get away from that. I thought I was longing for abstraction, when it was probably a kind of calm and stillness I was longing for, a focus on a single object instead of hundreds.”

—Mamma Andersson

Mamma Andersson

Armageddon, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

Characterized by a unique combination of textured brushstrokes, loose washes, stark graphic lines, and evocative colors, Mamma Andersson’s works embody a new genre of painting that recalls late nineteenth-century Romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions.

Mamma Andersson

Ohh, Deer, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

“Andersson builds her paintings from a wealth of art-historical references and found photos, ﬁlms and historical clippings. They are painting on painting, pictures of pictures.… Filtered through her singular artistic vision, at once both dryly observant and colorfully poetic, a new world emerges, even when it’s based on something that once was.”

—Poul Erik Tøjner, director, Louisiana Museum

Mamma Andersson

The Misunderstood, 2023

Oil on canvas

43 1/4 x 57 3/8 inches (110 x 145.7 cm)

This exhibition follows Andersson’s major 2021 solo presentation at the Louisiana Museum. As the artist explains, “The exhibition in Louisiana [is] perhaps the most important in my life [and] spans a long part of my career. It starts approximately where my solo exhibition at Moderna Museet finished in 2007 and shows paintings until today.”

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Humdrum Days, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2021

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Humdrum Days, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2021

Installation view, Mamma Andersson, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2007

Installation view, Mamma Andersson, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2007

Installation view, Mamma Andersson, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, 2010–2011

Installation view, Mamma Andersson, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, 2010–2011

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Dog Days, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany, 2011–2012

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Dog Days, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany, 2011–2012

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 2018–2019

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 2018–2019

Installation view, Mamma Andersson in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo: Effective Affinities, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2018

Installation view, Mamma Andersson in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo: Effective Affinities, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2018

“Andersson is arguably Sweden’s most famous contemporary artist.… What makes her work remarkable is the color, the vision, the downright painterliness of it all; her large, heavy canvases pulse with texture in dreamlike figurations that evoke the great painters of the past. But her similarity with her predecessors stops there.… Hauntingly beautiful, her paintings are suffused with darkness.”

—Emily Nathan, Kinfolk

Mamma Andersson

Adieu Maria Magdalena, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

The works in Adieu Maria Magdalena consider recurring themes from Andersson’s oeuvre and suggest complex and potent feelings related to loss. Marking a metaphorical farewell to a previous phase in her life, the exhibition title takes its name from a seventeenth-century church in the neighborhood where Andersson has long resided.

Mamma Andersson, Adieu Maria Magdalena, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Adieu Maria Magdalena, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Adieu Maria Magdalena, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Adieu Maria Magdalena, 2023 (detail)

“Her painterly vocabulary is contemporary—layered and varied, sometimes in thin, watercolor-like glazes, other times applied roughly in thick tar-like strokes. Her work with painting as a contemporary art medium is balanced at the point where matter becomes image. Where oil, acrylic, charcoal and oil stick merge into representation. Where we see both the image and the stuff from which it is made, the craftsmanship and the concept, at once.”

—Marie Laurberg, director, Copenhagen Contemporary

Mamma Andersson

Willy-nilly, 2023

Oil on canvas

57 3/8 x 43 1/4 inches (145.7 x 110 cm)

Andersson’s often-panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up: mountainous backdrops, trees, snow, and wooden cabins are recurrent elements within her works.

Yet, rather than conveying specific spatial or temporal reference points, they revolve around the expression of atmospheres and subjective moods, and frequently appear to merge the past, the present, and the future.

Mamma Andersson, Willy-nilly, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Willy-nilly, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Willy-nilly, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Willy-nilly, 2023 (detail)

“Theater and photography both depict what once was or what could somehow be, and Andersson’s paintings exhibit that same narrative anxiety that can result from these temporal dislocations.… Many of her works can be read as film stills, in which a variety of actions are frozen together in a single captured frame—all time at the same time.”

—Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and director, Orange County Museum of Art

Mamma Andersson

Quel Bordel, 2023

Oil on canvas

57 3/8 x 43 1/4 inches (145.7 x 110 cm)

In several works in the exhibition, the artist continues to pay homage to Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911), a Swedish landscape painter who studied in France. Andersson’s own landscapes summon up Hill’s loose brushwork and variegated palette but are, by contrast, confined by elements of domestic architecture.

Carl Fredrik Hill, Seine, Motif from St Germain, 1877

Carl Fredrik Hill, Seine, Motif from St Germain, 1877

Mamma Andersson

Lièvre Mort d’Erhenstrahl, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Often her compositions loosely evoke traditional East Asian folding-screen painting, a genre that the artist has admired for many years.

Chinese folding screen with figures in a landscape, nineteenth century (detail). Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Chinese folding screen with figures in a landscape, nineteenth century (detail). Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“Sometimes with a slightly Japanese inflection, she combines the sensuousness of Édouard Vuillard and the haunted moodiness of Edvard Munch.… Like the British painter Peter Doig, Ms. Andersson never seems to know in advance exactly how she will paint something, and that gives her traditionalism an uncommon freshness.”

—Ken Johnson, The New York Times

Édouard Vuillard, The Dressing Table, 1895 (detail). Private collection

Édouard Vuillard, The Dressing Table, 1895 (detail). Private collection

Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892 (detail). Collection of Kode, Bergen, Norway

Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892 (detail). Collection of Kode, Bergen, Norway

“I’m clearly influenced by the Impressionists and the fin-de-siècle. That’s where I grew as an artist. Bonnard and … Matisse have very much set my agenda. But I don’t want to return to that style. It’s more that I use the look.”

—Mamma Andersson

Mamma Andersson’s studio, 2023. Photo by Staffan Sundström for Kinfolk

Mamma Andersson’s studio, 2023. Photo by Staffan Sundström for Kinfolk

Departing from earlier oil-on-board works, the paintings on view in Paris primarily utilize canvas, a support that allows Andersson to create at a larger scale and expand compositional possibilities within the pictorial space.

Mamma Andersson

Speculi Oculo II, 2023

Oil on canvas

41 1/2 x 31 5/8 inches (105.3 x 80.2 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Speculi Oculo III, 2023

Oil on canvas

41 1/2 x 31 5/8 inches (105.3 x 80.2 cm)

Mamma Andersson, Speculi Oculo III, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Speculi Oculo III, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Speculi Oculo II, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson, Speculi Oculo II, 2023 (detail)

Mamma Andersson

Still Life Adhuc Vita, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

While these works evoke barren scenes by such artists as Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1816), they are also touched by Andersson’s personal life. “These rooms and these warped reflections just seem to be what’s coming out right now.… And it’s a metaphor, probably. I’m just letting the process tell me where to go,” she explains.

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, 1899 (detail). Collection of Tate, London

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, 1899 (detail). Collection of Tate, London

Mamma Andersson, 2023. Photo by Staffan Sundström for Kinfolk

Mamma Andersson, 2023. Photo by Staffan Sundström for Kinfolk

“[Andersson’s works] represent a familiar contemporary Swedish girl culture, but with a faint ring of something other, something foreign, late medieval, and this, the simultaneous presence of two different time levels, generates a certain unease, difficult to pinpoint but still present, among the emotions awakened by the paintings.”

—Karl Ove Knausgård, author

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

Installation view, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, David Zwirner, Paris, 2023

Coming Soon: Two New Books on Mamma Andersson

Featuring essays by Norwegian author and novelist Karl Ove Knausgård.

Pre-Order Now: Mamma Andersson: Sleepless and Mamma Andersson: A Storm Warning

Inquire About Works by Mamma Andersson

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

Installation view, Mamma Andersson, David Zwirner, Paris, dated 2023

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

An installation view of the exhibition, Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena, at David Zwirner in Paris, dated 2023.

Mamma Andersson

Armageddon, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Adieu Maria Magdalena, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Lièvre Mort d’Erhenstrahl, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Amulette, 2023

Oil on canvas

22 3/8 x 18 1/2 inches (56.7 x 47 cm)

Mamma Andersson

The Misunderstood, 2023

Oil on canvas

43 1/4 x 57 3/8 inches (110 x 145.7 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Vespera, 2023

Oil on canvas

26 1/4 x 18 1/2 inches (66.7 x 47 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Speculi Oculo III, 2023

Oil on canvas

41 1/2 x 31 5/8 inches (105.3 x 80.2 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Speculi Oculo II, 2023

Oil on canvas

41 1/2 x 31 5/8 inches (105.3 x 80.2 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Still Life Adhuc Vita, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Quel Bordel, 2023

Oil on canvas

57 3/8 x 43 1/4 inches (145.7 x 110 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Willy-nilly, 2023

Oil on canvas

57 3/8 x 43 1/4 inches (145.7 x 110 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Speculi Oculo I, 2023

Oil on canvas

36 x 29 inches (91.5 x 73.5 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Behind the Masks, 2023

Oil on canvas

57 3/8 x 43 1/4 inches (145.7 x 110 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Ohh, Deer, 2023

Oil on canvas

79 x 55 1/8 inches (200.5 x 140 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Döden Döden Döden, 2023

Oil on canvas

22 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches (57 x 47 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Vacua domus II, 2023

Oil on canvas

22 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches (57.3 x 47 cm)

Mamma Andersson

Vacua Domus I, 2023

Oil on canvas

22 5/8 x 18 1/2 inches (57.5 x 47 cm)

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