Mamma Andersson: Adieu Maria Magdalena

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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 Hammershi, 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.

Author Bio

Characterized by a unique combination of textured brushstrokes, loose washes, stark graphic lines, and evocative colors, Mamma Andersson's (b. 1962) works embody a new genre of painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions that draw inspiration from a wide range of source materials.

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.