Mamma Andersson & Jockum Nordström

Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in northern Sweden in a sparsely populated, rural area called Lulea. She has been living and working in Stockholm since attending the Royal University College of Fine Arts from 1986-93. Andersson’s international breakthrough began with her selection as Sweden’s representative at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) with a solo exhibition, Devil May Care. In 2006, David Zwirner Gallery in New York devoted a solo show to her work titled, Rooms Under the Influence. “Her paintings tell a story, but they don’t reveal. You enter in, but there is no beginning, no middle and no end. The viewer creates their own narrative. There is something deeply psychological in her portrayal of landscapes and people,” David Zwirner said. Later that year Andersson won the prestigious Carnegie International Art Award for Nordic painting and was given a solo show, The Undiscovered Country, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. “My style follows a very Nordic painting tradition: landscapes, interiors, relationships, and dramas. I am very much inspired by theater and film,” said Anderson in a 2007 Women’s Wear Daily Scoop article titled “Red Hot Mamma.” She says the stage-like space created in her paintings, “is absurd but you buy into it, because it’s life in a distilled form.” Andersson’s composition style has been compared to playwright Harold Pinter for whom she was commissioned to create a picture accompanying the certificate for his Nobel Prize for Literature. Andersson’s artistic plot is influenced by fables, myths, pop music, and art history. Her desolate landscapes, foreboding sense of calamity, and introspective figures relate to the drama in paintings by Munch, Van Gogh and Hopper.

In 2007, Mamma Andersson was the subject of a mid-career exhibition organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, traveling to the Hesingfors Konstall, Helsinki, Finland and the Camden Arts Centre, London. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Kim Levin writes about Andersson’s paintings, “Their disruptions of time and space, inversions of interior and exterior, and combinations of persistent memory and blank amnesia created a permeable membrane between life and art. They were weird, sure of themselves, and absolutely disaffected.” In 2008 Anderson was invited to Crown Point Press where she created three color etchings whose interior and exterior scenes offer portals to a mysterious reality. The exhibition, Setting the Scene, (2009) featured her first print project at Crown Point Press. In 2010, she returned to Crown Point Press with her husband, artist Jockum Nordström, where they collaborated on new six etchings. Other recent exhibitions include: Officescapes, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm, Sweden (2008); Essential Painting, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2006) and the 15th Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2006). She is represented by Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm; the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; and David Zwirner Gallery, New York. She currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2010 Andersson had her first solo museum show in the U.S., at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado.

Courtesy of Dana Zullo, Crown Point Press

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Jockum Nordström’s work, according to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, “is a more or less truculent crazy quilt of images, styles and events. Past and present are one, and the subconscious is present.” Nordström was born in 1963 in the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden. He grew up watching his mother sew, and has always been interested in textiles. He has made drawings as long as he can remember. He studied art at Stockholm College of Art and Design, and began showing his work in Sweden in the late eighties. It was not long until Americans found out about him. He was included in a group show at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco in 1999, and then in 2000 joined the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, where his wife, the painter Karin Mamma Andersson, is also represented. Nordström had a major solo exhibition accompanied by the publication of a catalog at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2005.

Nordström is an artistic omnivore. He makes furniture, designs carpets, illustrates children’s books (including the popular Swedish series Sailor and Pekka), designs album covers, constructs architectural models, and makes animated films. When he discovered he was allergic to oil paints, he adopted watercolor, gouache, graphite, and scissors as his primary tools. He builds many images with collage, and is always making new parts (he has a whole drawer of heads) to fill up his compositions. One can feel a restless energy in his collage characters, as if they get out of their drawers in the middle of the night and make up new situations while no one is looking. Nordström’s collage technique adapted easily to the etching process for a 2008 print project at Crown Point Press. While Nordström’s style refers to folk and naïve traditions, it is sophisticated and precise. Songbirds grip their reed perches with carefully observed feet, and the gestures of the figures are exact. Notice, for instance, how the girls’ fingers are spread out on their thighs to smooth down their very short skirts. As Roberta Smith put it, “Nordström’s drawings have a hallucinatory power all their own, which emanates less from his imagery than from the extraordinary range of drawing techniques that bring it into being.”

Nordström and his family have chosen a quiet suburban life. Modern apartment blocks stretch across many of his drawings. The imaginary world of the paintings seems like a secret diamond mine having come from an ordinary place. Chris Johanson, interviewing Nordström for ANP Quarterly, asked how his life makes its way into his work. Nordström replied, “ If you stand for something, then you have to free yourself many times, maybe all the time. Free yourself from your prototypes, from yourself, from your parents, from fear and tiredness.” Nordström’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and many private collections in Europe and the United States. He is represented by Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm, and David Zwirner in New York.

Courtesy of Christine Peterson, Crown Point Press