BOLDTYPE ISSUE #46: Artwork By
The cover of this issue of Boldtype is Heimat Land (2004), a magnificent painting, 119 inches long, by Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson. It is included in Mamma Andersson, a catalogue published by Steidl & Partners in 2007 to accompany the artist's mid-career retrospective at Stockholm's Moderna Museet. Like a trip to the countryside, Andersson's evocative paintings offer a hiatus from the cosmopolitan hubbub surrounding new media and installation art. Beloved for their generous originality, Mamma Andersson's paintings evolve slowly from her imagination and continuous tinkering in the studio.
Neither flashy nor naïve, Andersson's work requires close and patient scrutiny. Her unconventional, intuitive application of paint — patches of thin, scumbled paint paired with thick streaks — echoes her varied array of subjects; interior scenes, landscapes, still lifes, figures, and the faded echoes of other paintings can all inhabit the same work. Andersson's body of work is a repository of uncanny scenes and images from all corners of daily life, organized by an elusive logic. As she says in an interview with Swedish playwright Lars Norén, "I don't think you need to know or understand anything. I don't paint for anyone who knows or doesn't know."
Karin Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in Luleå, Sweden, a town near the Arctic Circle. She studied art at the Kungliga Konsthögskolan in Stockholm from 1986 to 1993. Until Devil-May-Care, the Nordic Pavilion exhibition for the 2003 Venice Biennale, Andersson remained one of Sweden's best-kept secrets. Subsequent exhibitions in London and the United States have confirmed her place alongside Laura Owens, Peter Doig, and Luc Tuymans, whose contributions have revivified the practice of painting in the last ten years.
- H.G. Masters
