Mamma Andersson: Œuvres sur papier

The artist has engaged with printmaking since the late 1990s. A formative and generative part of Andersson’s practice, the medium inspires and enables her to work through new compositional strategies. Printmaking has also allowed the artist to occasionally depart from the solitude of the studio and collaborate with others to produce work. Andersson has published editions with renowned print shops such as BORCH Editions, Copenhagen; Crown Point Press, San Francisco; and Edition Copenhagen, among others.

On view in Œuvres sur papier is a diverse selection of prints created at these studios using a variety of techniques—etching, lithography, and woodcut—as well as unique drawings that further illuminate Andersson’s process and affinity for working on paper. The artist was awarded the prestigious Guerlain Drawing Prize by the Daniel and Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation, Paris, in 2018.

The exhibition will debut a new series of etchings, Porte clé (2026), published by David Zwirner’s print publisher, Utopia Editions. The imagery in these new works takes as its departure paintings from Andersson’s 2023 exhibition in our Paris gallery, Adieu Maria Magdalena. The artist created the six etchings at the Atelier Tazé-Lipreau-Araï—an intaglio print studio walking distance from the gallery—returning to the city on several occasions over the past two years to refine the works. 
 
Andersson’s new etchings revisit enigmatic subjects that recur in her oeuvre, while introducing new motifs sourced from found imagery. Evoking private and personal associations, these works portray furniture, doll-like figurines, deer heads, and mysterious landscapes. They relate to the paintings that were exhibited in Adieu Maria Magdalena and pay homage to Chinese woodblock prints, the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), and Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911), a Swedish landscape artist who studied in France and whose oeuvre primarily comprised works on paper. Andersson’s interplay of surfaces and subject matter probe the nature of representation, with particular attention to interior settings that capture a sense of the unearthly and the uncanny.