The Blank Memories Always Open From the South, 2002. Courtesy Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; and David Zwirner, New York. © Mamma Andersson
using the coordinates of influence and observation to locate and Some of the paintings give out unmistakable messages of loss.
map a territory is one of the ways in which artists create a reassuringly Take one of her best-known works, The Blank Memories Always Open
knowable world from a bewildering array of impulses and signs. From the South (2002), in which a modernist sculpture faces an ancient
For Karin Mamma Andersson, however, you sense that mapping the ruin across a mephitic river. If there is a higher power here, it has long
world in this way is only as useful as recondite powers of divination: since ceased communication. One of the bleakest paintings she has
for all its art-historical savvy and painterly sophistication, Andersson’s made, this is also one of her sparsest compositions. More often, the
work seems to express a sense of the unknown, of outsiderdom. Her pictures weave in and out of different types of space – landscape and
modest background in the rural north of Sweden might be thought of interior, dream and actuality, past and present. Andersson is unafraid
as having planted this nascent characteristic, but perhaps it is adulthood of the jarring fragment, too, the misinterpretation that, once burrowed
itself that confers a sense of exile. Certainly, while the children in into the mind, won’t disappear. Paintings such as the ghostly Bohemians
Andersson’s paintings are often preoccupied by group activities (2000) imply that creativity itself can seem as unlikely and remote as
that palliate isolation – in the diptych We Do Boring Things Together a dream, but there’s also a kind of tacit rationalism percolating through
(2003) or Study Kit (2004), for example – grownups aren’t nearly so Andersson’s art, rescuing it and us from whimsy or cliché. This is
lucky. Sad and humorous, pictures such as Sunday (2006), with its increasingly prevalent in recent work, such as the two Backbiter paintings
aerobics before an apocalyptic dawn, are eloquent essays in futility. from 2006, a pair of subtly altered still-lifes in mirror image that hint
There’s something subtle and mischievous being said here, about the at the ways in which things can change irrevocably in the moving
filling of time, about self-improvement and belonging to something. around of a few ornaments. Quite what’s being expressed is never
Using familiar touchstones – the landscape, domestic rooms and made clear, for these are paintings that only begin to tell stories. Not
museum interiors – Andersson questions how we inhabit the world, in the sense of being deliberately obtuse but, conversely, in a way that
ultimately testing the importance we ascribe to our beliefs, to faith reveals a deeper level of understanding. In art as in life, enlightenment
(whatever we understand that to be). can prove to be quite a disappointment.
Mamma Andersson.indd 3 3/8/07 12:54:55
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