Karin Mamma Andersson

The Swedish painter Karin “Mamma” Andersson is reluctant to recount how she got her name. “Everybody always asks me about that, so it’s boring to me now,” she says, and launches into the tale, making me promise that I’ll keep it to myself. It’s a good story, and it takes us back to her art-school days as a bright-eyed fugitive from the country’s dark north—a lonely girl who found her place in the big, cold city. At the heart of the story is a kernel of amiable perversity, a mischievous refusal to do what’s proper or what’s expected, and it’s there that I discover a foundational truth about her, an essential characteristic that can be found blossoming throughout her saturated, soulful canvases: Mamma Andersson is an outlaw. 

You’d never know it, by looking at her. In a vintage blouse and leather lace-ups, her hair parted neatly in the middle and twinkling eyes framed by large plastic rims, she appears wholesome rather than contrarian; bookish rather than bold. But she speaks with surprising frankness, betraying her insecurities in an offhand, lighthearted kind of way, and peppers her narratives with anecdotes of subtle resistance.

When I arrive at her Stockholm studio on a sunny day in April, Andersson is not wearing pants, despite a photographer and his assistants huddled behind the lens of a camera on a tripod. “Sorry,” she says with a roll of her eyes, pulling on a pair of wrinkled jeans. “I’ll be decent now. You wouldn’t believe what they brought me for this photo shoot—oversize jackets in crazy colors, what all the Stockholm ladies are wearing. I don’t like how they all look the same. But I did recently see the film Tar, and I had a big problem after because I felt, Oh, I’m so masculine! I must do something to be more feminine.” Having completed the thought out loud, she buries her face in her hands.

Andersson is arguably Sweden’s most famous contemporary artist. Since breaking into the American market with a show at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, she has conquered the international landscape, winning the Carnegie Art Award, representing Scandinavia at the Venice Biennale, and joining the permanent collections of such hallowed institutions as New York’s MoMA, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MOCA in LA and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. 

For the past 13 years, she has worked in this airy atelier occupying the bottom floor of a lemon-yellow building between a kindergarten and a park in the Swedish capital. Flanked by windows, the space overflows with books, which are stacked and piled on ceiling-high bookshelves or spread open on the paint-splattered floor. There are easels against walls, easels under windows and tables dripping with pigment: oil paints in thick, creamy chunks; a rainbow of acrylic tubes, crudely arranged. A collector, Andersson has staged altars around the room, modest vignettes of meaningful objects that provide both atmosphere and inspiration. 

When arriving in Stockholm by plane, the bones and silhouettes of Andersson’s paintings reveal themselves like fossils: aerial views of lakes snaking between hillsides, red farmhouses surrounded by mahogany-tipped brush, and stands of trees, their shadows jutting into the water. Trains disappear under craggy rock and emerge again into ochre stretches of ground; pines mingle with the brown spindles of bare trunks. There is forest, too, thick and deep—even the airport is fringed by forest. For a country so civilized, there is something wild about it: The sheer scale of the landscape is overwhelming. 

“If you work with art, you take the water from your own well,” Andersson tells me, when I ask why she has described every painting as a self-portrait. “And of course, you can borrow water from other people’s well, but the main source is coming from yourself. I’m often asked if I have a plan for my paintings, but I don’t. I walk in and see the rug I painted yesterday and I think, Okay, I need a floor under the rug. Or, that rabbit must have fur—it’s too flat. Or, these colors are not so good together. I see what’s there, and I respond to it. It’s an intuitive thing, but to be intuitive, you have to trust yourself. And that takes time.”

These days, her studio is filled with canvases she’s creating for an upcoming show at David Zwirner Gallery in Paris. “Ah, the empty rooms,” she sighs. Indeed, the paintings depict moody, grand spaces, interiors and exteriors, reflected in surfaces that echo to infinity—all of them devoid of life. She says that she’s recently been fascinated by large, 18th-century mirrors whose size required the junction of two panes, producing a distorting seam in the middle, and that they continue to make an appearance in her art. “These rooms and these warped reflections just seem to be what’s coming out right now,” she adds, gesturing toward a collage of reference images on the wall: a Japanese block print of a geisha; wallpaper patterns. “And it’s a metaphor, probably. I’m just letting the process tell me where to go.” 

At lunchtime, we make our way across the park to Post Bar, a neighborhood diner where Andersson eats three times a week. She greets the waitresses warmly, and we’re seated in a booth. Over steamed fish and potatoes, she orders a beer and speaks wistfully about motherhood, her parents, her sons, until a game of tag between a bird and a rat on a pile of dirt outside the window ensorcells her. “Magpies are very smart, you know; the bird is taunting the rat on purpose!” she says, and stops to watch them as we leave, her eyes gleaming with approval. 

Back at the studio, she invites me to join her on the couch for a slice of cardamom cake. “I think my way of working has really changed,” she says, unprompted. “I do much more by hand, and don’t use so much reference—it makes you secure in one way, but insecure in another. You lean on the picture, but it’s better to lean on yourself.” A magpie of sorts, Andersson has spent her life establishing a homemade archive of found photographs that she has historically used as inspiration, copying an element from an image and using it as “the entrance into a painting.” But in recent years, she tells me, she prefers to rely on her own interior aesthetic world, and has become confident enough to trust her instincts—no matter what shape they might take on the canvas. 

“Many of the artists I appreciate most, like Guston or Van Gogh, didn’t care if it looked right or not,” Andersson says, gazing at a series of black-and-white photographs on the wall. They are portraits of the artists who mean the most to her: Paul Gaugin, the writer Gustaf Hellström, Edvard Munch, Paul Matisse, Picasso—and the Marx Brothers. “It’s something very beautiful and simple when you are not correct. You can have much more experience than painting precisely after a photograph, making porcelain so real you could touch it. That can be very nice, but it can also be very uninteresting, because the reality is always there in front of us. I think what we need, what we really need, is the fantasy.”