Karin Mamma Andersson

Karin Mamma Andersson. By Karin Mamma Andersson. Essays by Ann-Sofi Noring and Charles Merewether, photographs of paintings by JH Engström. Steidl & Partners, 2007. 160 pp., four colour throughout, 28 cm x 21.7 cm (hardcover).

"The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with a highly idiosyncratic imagery, engendered by the mysteries of dreams, fairytales and everyday life. She paints with an indefatigable passion for storytelling, spreading the paint thickly with broad, sweeping gestures, or dryly and sparsely, across the canvas. Glimmering beauty and dark maelstroms of doom are sampled with elements from myths, films and dreams, the absurd and the realistic, in the same picture. Her early works feature children in vast landscapes, echoing her own childhood in northern Sweden. The figures are set, each separately, in forests, by lakes, in the countryside. This rural setting later gives way to the interiors of the art world – cluttered framers’ workshops, libraries and elegant salons with finely ornamented objects. More recently, these rooms have opened up towards new worlds, where dream and reality seem to be careening. Whatever motifs she paints, the atmosphere appears to be fairly constant: a form of serenity in between finding and forgetting. The titles underline the ambiguity, explaining nothing but running parallel with the paintings."

This book produced by Steidl together with Moderna Museet in Stockholm is wonderful! We went and saw the exhibition in the spring and thoroughly enjoyed it, but the paintings came alive and at the same time seemed to flow first when I looked through the book. The quality of the paper and the reproduction of the paintings are outstanding!

Buy the book or go and see the exhibition at Moderna museet (exhibition ends tomorrow Aug 5th) or if you can't make the exhibition buy the book through Steidl.