Here are some titles of paintings by Mamma Andersson: Dead End, Dog Days, Doldrums, Humdrum Day, Lull, Last Waltz, The Lost Paradise, Dagen Efter (The Day After). If you’d never seen a single work by the artist widely considered to be the pre-eminent Swedish painter of her generation, you might still glean some sense of her work from those titles, though not of her canvases’ alkaline beauty. Andersson, who is in her late fifties and whose work swivels between landscape, intimist still life and a guarded kind of portraiture – and sometimes is all of these at once – is a maker of motionless things that nevertheless, and unmistakably, have time encoded in them.
Take Dog Days (2011), one of 58 works in her current retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, and characteristically based on a found black-and-white photograph (this one sourced via a police officer in Stockholm, where Andersson lives). It depicts a crime investigation mid-dig, replete with shovels, buckets and hazard tape; three excavators in pistachio-coloured outfits dig through the earth, one covering their face or perhaps shielding their nose from decomposition’s stink. A black blur, an artefact of Andersson reworking her canvas, erasing something, hangs centre stage, ambiguously symbolic. The image pauses us before a dark revelation, holding it perpetually and almost consolingly offstage.