Karin Mamma Andersson
The Swedish painting star of recent decades.
Karin Mamma Andersson paints dreamlike interiors and landscapes in which reality and memory merge. She represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
Karin Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in Luleå. She acquired the nickname Mamma early on and has kept it as her artist's name. She studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in the 2000s became one of Sweden's most internationally successful painters.
Her paintings often show interiors, landscapes and scenes that seem familiar yet strange. A room can be both a living room and a stage set; a forest can be both real and a memory. She draws her motifs from photographs, films, folk art, theatre and art history, and mixes them freely. There are often several pictures within the same picture, such as reflections or paintings on a wall.
Her technique is distinctive. She likes to paint on wood or board with thin, diluted layers of oil or acrylic. The paint is allowed to run, and the surface becomes translucent and fragile. This gives the pictures a quiet, somewhat melancholy tone that many have compared with Nordic predecessors such as Vilhelm Hammershøi and Edvard Munch, but also with film and theatre.
In 2003 she represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which became her international breakthrough. She has since exhibited at major museums and galleries in Europe and the United States, and her work is held by Moderna Museet. She is married to the artist Jockum Nordström, and they have sometimes exhibited together.
Mamma Andersson has helped to give figurative painting new standing in Sweden. Her dreamlike, narrative pictures have inspired many younger painters and show that painting can still depict memory and inner life in a way other media cannot.