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Sunday 16 February

Mamma Andersson: Troubled Mirrors of Everyday Life

Published on: 28 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

In Mamma Andersson’s works, the most mundane domestic scenes transform into a metaphysical theater where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Her unique painting technique, alternating between smooth surfaces and rough textures, creates a constant tension between the familiar and the uncanny.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. I’m going to tell you about Mamma Andersson, born in 1962, a Swedish artist who has made the banality of everyday life her hunting ground. You might say that painting domestic interiors and snowy landscapes is tediously conventional. But think again. Andersson is living proof that true radicality lies not in gratuitous provocation, but in the ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Based in Stockholm, this magician of the canvas works a singular alchemy where the most banal scenes metamorphose into metaphysical theater. Her technique is a constant challenge to pictorial conventions. She alternates glass-smooth surfaces with rough textures that seem torn from the earth itself. Her colors, often muted and melancholic, evoke the long Scandinavian winter nights, yet occasionally glow with unexpected brightness, like northern lights piercing the darkness.

The concept of the uncanny, as developed by Freud, finds a striking embodiment in her work. Das Unheimliche, that unsettling sensation when the familiar becomes foreign, pervades every one of her paintings. Take “Kitchen Fight”, for example. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary kitchen with utensils and decorative bear figurines. But wait. Look closer. A corpse lies on the floor, almost invisible as it blends into the background. This juxtaposition of the banal and the macabre isn’t a cheap trick. It’s a profound meditation on our ability to normalize horror, rendering it invisible through sheer familiarity.

This psychoanalytic dimension is coupled with a reflection on the nature of perception itself. Andersson demonstrates that seeing is not a passive act but an active construction where our psyche plays a crucial role. Her paintings are like Rorschach tests in which each viewer projects their own anxieties and desires. The black stains that frequently appear in her works, like burns in the fabric of reality, are not mere stylistic effects. They function as portals into our collective unconscious, a concept dear to Carl Gustav Jung.

In “About a Girl” (2005), nine women are gathered around a table. The scene might resemble an ordinary bourgeois luncheon, but Andersson renders it deeply unsettling. The black-clad bodies blend into one another, forming an indistinct organic mass. Only three faces meet our gaze, reminding us that we are voyeurs, intruders in this liminal space between reality and dream. The brown curtain falling behind them is not just decorative; it’s a porous boundary between our world and Jungian archetypes.

Andersson’s relationship with space is particularly intriguing. She manipulates perspective like a magician playing with our perceptions. In “Rooms Under the Influence”, she creates three distinct levels of reality: a fragmented domestic interior, its inverted and distorted reflection, and a distant landscape seemingly floating above it all. This spatial stratification isn’t just a formal exercise—it’s a meditation on the very nature of reality and representation.

In Andersson’s landscapes, her snowy forests, ink-black lakes, and misty mountains are not mere representations of nature. They are projections of our internal topography, maps of our collective psyche. In “Cry”, the waterfalls cascading down the cheeks of a cliff serve as a powerful metaphor for human emotion. Under her brush, nature becomes a mirror of our soul, a space where the internal and external merge in a perpetual dance.

Theater occupies a central place in her visual vocabulary, not as a mere formal reference, but as a metaphor for the human condition. Her interiors often resemble stage sets, creating a mise en abyme where the viewer becomes both observer and participant. This theatricality echoes the baroque concept of the “theatrum mundi”, where the world itself is perceived as a stage and we all as unwitting actors in a cosmic drama.

Time in her works is as complex as her treatment of space. In Andersson’s paintings, time is not linear. It folds, refolds, and overlays itself, as in Henri Bergson’s reflections on duration. Every moment contains potentially all others, creating a temporal density that lends her works their particular depth. In “Leftovers”, a woman is depicted at various moments of her day, creating a temporal choreography that defies conventional chronology.

Objects in Andersson’s universe are never mere objects. An empty chair, an unmade bed, a table set for tea become almost animistic presences, charged with meaning beyond their utilitarian function. In “Dollhouse”, the empty rooms of a dollhouse take on a metaphysical dimension, as if each chamber were a receptacle for crystallized memories and emotions. These domestic objects function as talismans, anchors in a world where reality constantly threatens to dissolve.

Light plays a major role in her work. It’s not the dazzling light of southern Europe but a Nordic luminosity, subtler and more ambiguous. It creates zones of chiaroscuro reminiscent of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings, but with a more pronounced psychological tension. This particular light contributes to the dreamlike atmosphere of her work, where shadows seem as substantial as the objects casting them.

Her cinematic influences are undeniable, particularly Ingmar Bergman. But where Bergman explored human dramas directly and often brutally, Andersson takes a more oblique approach, letting psychological tensions accumulate beneath the calm surface of her compositions. It’s this restraint, this contained tension, that gives her work its distinctive power. She shows us that the deepest horrors lie not in explosions of violence but in the silence, in the waiting before the storm.

Her painting technique itself contributes to this narrative tension. She uses a variety of media and techniques, moving from oil to acrylic, from transparent glazes to opaque impastos. The surfaces of her paintings are like testimonies, where different layers of reality overlap and intertwine. The accidents of paint, the drips, the scratched or erased areas, are not mistakes but essential elements of her pictorial vocabulary.

References to art history in her work are subtle yet omnipresent. One can see echoes of Munch in her emotional treatment of the landscape, Hammershøi in her silent interiors, and Giorgio Morandi in her way of transforming everyday objects into mysterious presences. Yet these influences are fully digested, transformed by her unique vision into something radically new.

Andersson’s relationship with narrative is particularly sophisticated. Her paintings suggest stories without ever explicitly telling them. They function as fragments of larger narratives we will never fully see. This fragmentary quality, rather than frustrating the viewer, invites them to become active participants in constructing meaning. Each painting is like a door ajar, opening onto a world of infinite narrative possibilities.

In her palette, the grays, browns, and washed-out greens that dominate her compositions are not chosen by default or ease. These are colors imbued with meaning, carrying all the melancholy of the North. Yet she also knows how to use pure color with surgical precision—a striking red or luminous yellow piercing the matte surface of her paintings like a cry in the silence.

In her most recent works, Andersson pushes her exploration of the boundaries between reality and representation even further. The edges between different planes of the image become increasingly porous, spaces contaminate each other, creating zones of indeterminacy where our perception wavers. This visual instability is not gratuitous; it reflects the growing fragility of our relationship to reality in the digital age.

Andersson’s work reminds us that reality is never as simple as it seems, that beneath the most banal surface lies something strange and inexplicable. In a world obsessed with transparency and clarity, her art offers a welcome space for mystery and ambiguity. She shows us that the true depth of existence doesn’t lie in grand dramas but in those everyday moments where reality wavers, and the strange bursts into our ordinary lives.

Her art is, ultimately, a subtle form of resistance against the banalization of the world. By transforming the everyday into something strange and wonderful, she reminds us that reality is always more complex and mysterious than we care to admit. Perhaps her greatest success lies in making us see the familiar with new eyes, as if discovering it for the first time.

Reference(s)

Karin Mamma ANDERSSON (1962)
First name: Karin Mamma
Last name: ANDERSSON
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • Sweden

Age: 63 years old (2025)

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