Mamma Andersson

Karin Mamma Andersson has gained international fame since her breakthrough as Sweden’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and after winning the prestigious Carnegie Art Award for painting in 2005. This summer’s exhibition at Moderna Museet presents her work to a wider audience.

The exhibition comprises some 50 paintings, with the emphasis on later works. This is her first retrospective arranged by Moderna Museet, and it will tour to Helsinki Taidehalli, Helsinki, and the Camden Arts Centre, London.

Karin Mamma Andersson’s paintings are based in a colouristic tradition with an idiosyncratic imagery sprung from dream, myth and art. “Her paintings are, first and foremost, about images – nothing more, and nothing less.” writes Kim Levin, American critic, in the extensive catalogue. She recalls her first encounter with Karin Mamma Andersson’s work “They hovered between the banal and the uncanny. Their disruptions of time and space, inversions of interior and exterior, and combinations of persistent memory and blank amnesia created a permeable membrane between life and art. Their self-referential use of the systems of modern representation, as well as the way the paintings just happened to be full of representations of artworks, stuck in my mind. They were weird, sure of themselves, and absolutely disaffected.”

Karin Mamma Andersson was born in Luleå in 1962 and has been living and working in Stockholm since attending the Royal University College of Fine Arts in 1986-93. She exhibits regularly at Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and David Zwirner, New York. Apart from Venice, she has participated in the biennials in Berlin (2006), Sydney (2006), and Carnegie International (2005), in addition to numerous international group exhibitions. Since 2004 she has been commissioned by the Nobel Committee to create the diplomas for the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mamma Andersson, the exhibition at Moderna Museet, is the artist’s most extensive exhibition to date. The catalogue includes essays by Ann-Sofi Noring, Kim Levin and Midori Matsui, poems by Thomas Tidholm and a conversation between Karin Mamma Andersson and the author and playwright Lars Norén.

Curator: Ann-Sofi Noring

Mamma Andersson
Karin Mamma Andersson
Kurator: Ann-Sofi Noring