BOOK: Mamma Andersson-A Storm Warning, David Zwirner Books

While stylistic references include turn-of-the-century Nordic figurative painting, folk art, and local or contemporary vernacular, Mamma Andersson’s evocative use of pictorial space and her juxtapositions of thick paint and textured washes are uniquely her own. In a series of paintings inspired by interiors and the landscape of her childhood, the Swedish painter Mamma Andersson muses on the line between reality and illusion. She introduces thoughtful warm hues into an otherwise cool, muted color palette, lending an otherworldly feeling to the everyday scenes and subject matter that populate this new body of work, painted between 2020 and 2021. The publication “A Storm Warning” features a commissioned essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a meditation on childhood memories of carefree exploration and the portal art creates between the world we live in and the worlds Andersson conjures with her brush. As Karl Ove Knausgaard says “What Mamma Andersson does in some of these pictures is on the one hand depict the illusions, the one thing which is another thing—masks, theater, statues, paintings—and on the other portray that which is only itself, potted plants, tree trunks, trees, landscapes. Everything is motionless, these rooms are located out of time”. –Efi Michalarou