Swedish painter Mamma Andersson's landscapes and interiors are a breath of fresh air in a contemporary art scene brimming with conceptually addled, technology-driven artwork. Backwoods (2006) — a winter landscape depicting a brooding sky and snow-streaked fields, dotted with darkened homes — encapsulates Andersson's probing romanticism and alacrity with paint, for which she has rightly been celebrated. Mamma Andersson, the eponymous catalog to her mid-career retrospective at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, prioritizes superb reproductions of the Swede's paintings over interpretative chatter, sufficing with a trio of poems by fellow Swedes and prosaic reflections from curator Ann-sofi Noring and other admirers.

The catalogue's most unique and brilliant feature consists of 38 foldout pages, which allow Andersson's horizontal paintings to be reproduced in wide spreads. Details of her richly textured paintings and grainy black-and-white photographs by Swedish photographer JH Engström are strategically interspersed on the overleafs. Engström's photographs portray Andersson at work, the views from her studio window, and closely cropped images of her blond hair in a fur hat — echoing passages from Andersson's recent paintings. Close-ups of her palette, strewn with paint tubes and piles of desiccated paint, reveal the similarity between the cluttered condition of Andersson's studio and the textured surface of her paintings. Like the reclusive French painter Pierre Bonnard, whom Andersson calls "one of my house gods," she addresses the daily practice of painting in both its banality and enchantment.

Mamma Andersson's work was little known outside of Sweden until her inclusion in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Her paintings from the '90s were mostly landscapes, often overlaid with mystical, hovering faces and minute figures. In the past few years, Andersson has turned to interior settings like book shops, museum galleries, and schools, shedding some of her overt idiosyncrasy for a refined, pared-down palette. We Work So Closely Without Even Knowing It (2005), a diptych in muted colors, depicts Andersson and her husband, the artist Jockum Nordström, each crouched on the floor of their studio, deeply absorbed in their painting. Serene and touching, the painting embodies a faith in the coexistence of professional productivity and personal companionship.

-H.G. Masters