Mamma Andersson

The equestrians riding into the angsty, orange sky in “Holiday” (pictured), by the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson, share the same DNA as Edvard Munch’s screamer and the Romantic loners of Caspar David Friedrich, but if they had a soundtrack it might be “In My Room,” by Brian Wilson. Most of the fourteen poetic pictures in Andersson’s show "The Lost Paradise," at the Zwirner gallery (online at davidzwirner.com), are landscapes, at once specifically Nordic and timelessly placeless. But they feel interior, too—the rewards of an artist battling uncertainty alone in her studio, inventing a world. Especially striking are the portraits of trees, whose bark springs to life through Andersson’s use of a new technique: oil stick, rubbed into the painted surfaces, leaves a trace so nubby that you can practically feel it, even onscreen. Andersson is married to the artist Jockum Nordström, a fellow-Swede who also exhibits at Zwirner; listen to the couple discuss the pleasures and the struggles of shared isolation on a new episode of "Dialogues," the gallery’s terrific podcast series on the creative process, now in its third season.

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