KARIN MAMMA ANDERSSON. “Dramatic Theater”.

Oil on canvas, 84 x 84 cm, unframed. Signed and dated on verso Karin Mamma Andersson 1999. Wear the inscription “oil on panel”.

PROVENANCE
Johan Wallin Collection, Uppsala
Art for the Globe Foundation

Expositions
Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm.

Karin “Mamma” Andersson (born 1962 in Luleå) is one of Sweden's most noted contemporary artists, known for her suggestive paintings whose subjects move in the borderland between reality and fantasy. Her visual world is often characterized by interiors, landscapes and theatrical scenes where everyday subjects meet dreamy and sometimes melancholic moods. With a painting that mixes references from art history, photography, film and theatre, she has created a distinctive style that has earned her international recognition.

At the end of the 1990s, Andersson's painting moved from landscape depictions towards interiors and the theatre and the stage room were given an important role. In the theatre's rooms and stages, Andersson's interest in stories, memories and psychological states is united with the basic questions of painting itself.

The auction piece Dramatic Theatre is an early key work in that direction: a stage-like room where props, stage paintings and stiff figures cast long shadows across a bright floor space. The restrained palette, the flat color fields and the clear shadows create an image of the theater as both physical place and psychological state. It is difficult to tell whether it is a real event and place, where what is unfolding feels like a theatrical play or just an embodiment of a spectacle. Paintings from this era often move between reality and fiction: empty rooms with traces of life, scenes reminiscent of scenes or stills from film, and landscapes in which nature appears as much as an inner place as an external environment. Through his low-key but intense palette — often dominated by muted earth tones and swarms — Andersson conveys a mood of reflection and stillness.

The work is followed by a series of paintings in which empty or half-inhabited interiors act as “psychological landscapes” and where references to scenography, film and photography come together in one and the same plane. During the early 2000s, this new direction, in which everyday scenes, interiors and landscapes are loaded with both a dreamlike mood and underlying darkness, has become characteristic of her artistry and leads to her artistic breakthrough internationally.

Andersson trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the 1980s and had his breakthrough in the 1990s. Internationally, she broke through at the Venice Biennale in 2003. She is represented by several major galleries and her work is in the collections of museums worldwide, including Moderna Museet in Stockholm and MoMA in New York.