Mamma Andersson: The Lost Paradise - Hardcover

by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Text by (Art/Photo Books)), Mamma Andersson (Author)

This volume celebrates the Swedish artist Mamma Andersson's new body of work--melancholic, evocatively colored paintings that explore femininity, fantasy, and memory.

Andersson's works embody a new genre of landscape painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up. The paintings utilize a selection of motifs from throughout her career: barren branches and thick-barked pine trees, domestic interiors, horses, and young women. Resembling still lifes, they further a tradition of quiet, dreamlike domestic scenes by Scandinavian artists such as Vilhelm Hammersh i (1864-1916) and Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Part of a self-conscious effort to capture an experience rather than a specific event, the compositions are freer and more abstract and mark a departure from her earlier work.

Splendid color reproductions bring the artist's textured brushstrokes, loose washes, and stark graphic lines to life on the page. The book also features a new essay by critically acclaimed author Karl Ove Knausgaard. The Lost Paradise is published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition presented at David Zwirner New York in 2020.

Author Biography

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author. He became renowned for his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle. He has been described as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations" by The Wall Street Journal. Since the completion of the My Struggle series in 2011, he has also published an autobiographical series entitled The Seasons Quartet as well as critical work on the art of Edvard Munch.

Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in Lulea, Sweden. She studied from 1986 to 1993 at the Kungl Konsthogskolan in Stockholm, where she continues to live and work.