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Adieu Maria Magdalena considers recurring themes and motifs from Mamma Andersson''s oeuvre and suggests complex and potent feelings related to loss. Finding inspiration in work by other Scandinavian painters, including Carl Fredrik Hill and Vilhelm Hammershoi, Andersson explores the tension between interiority and the external world, imbuing her compositions with a haunting stillness and introspection. Departing from earlier oil-on-board paintings, the paintings in this body of work primarily utilize canvas, a support that allows Andersson to create at a larger scale and expand compositional possibilities within the pictorial space. Employing trompe l''oeil, the artist produces a subtly claustrophobic effect in domestic spaces by layering uncanny interior scenes taken from her own home and her imagination, an interplay of surfaces and imagery that probes the nature of representation. This catalogue, published on the occasion of the artist''s first solo exhibition in Paris, at David Zwirner, and a companion to three other volumes of recent work, marks a metaphorical farewell to a previous phase in her life. The author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a frequent collaborator of Andersson''s, provides an accompanying text, offering an oneiric perspective on the artist''s evocation of layered dimensions.
About the author
Born 1962 in Luleå, Sweden, Mamma Andersson studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm, from 1986 to 1993. She had her first museum solo exhibition in the United States at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, in 2010, and her first solo exhibition in Ireland at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 2009. In 2006, the artist won the Carnegie Art Award, a prestigious prize for Nordic contemporary painting, which received a corresponding exhibition that traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 2007, she was the subject of a critically acclaimed mid-career survey at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which traveled to the Kunsthalle Helsinki and the Camden Arts Centre, London. Her work was represented in the Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author. He became known worldwide for six autobiographical novels, titled
My Struggle. He has been described as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations" by the
Wall Street Journal. Since the completion of the
My Struggle series in 2011, he has also published an autobiographical series entitled
The Seasons Quartet, as well as critical work on the art of Edvard Munch.
