Steidlville

The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with a highly idiosyncratic imagery, engendered by the mysteries of dreams, fairytales and everyday life. She paints with an indefatigable passion for storytelling, spreading the paint thickly with broad, sweeping gestures, or dryly and sparsely, across the canvas. Glimmering beauty and dark maelstroms of doom are sampled with elements from myths, films and dreams, the absurd and the realistic, in the same picture. Her early works feature children in vast landscapes, echoing her own childhood in northern Sweden. The figures are set, each separately, in forests, by lakes, in the countryside. This rural setting later gives way to the interiors of the art world – cluttered framers’ workshops, libraries and elegant salons with finely ornamented objects. More recently, these rooms have opened up towards new worlds, where dream and reality seem to be careening. Whatever motifs she paints, the atmosphere appears to be fairly constant: a form of serenity in between finding and forgetting. The titles underline the ambiguity, explaining nothing but running parallel with the paintings.