Mamma Andersson: Sleepless - by Mamma Andersson & Karl Ove Knausgaard (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A celebration of the representation, figuration, and classical antiquity in Mamma Andersson's newest paintings.

"When I look at this collection of pictures, . . . what strikes me first is the image-making capacity itself and the endless stream of images it brings forth and always has brought forth into the world." --Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mamma Andersson: Sleepless

The Swedish painter Mamma Andersson draws inspiration from a wide range of photographic source materials, art history, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden. The paintings and works on paper collected in this volume explore atmosphere and mood through representations of masks, statues, and figurines, which take on a dreamlike, mythical quality in stark silhouettes. While recalling classical genres of still life, landscape, and interiors, this body of work, painted in 2021 and 2022, blends our sense of the past, present, and future.

A companion to the artist's previous books A Storm Warning and The Lost Paradise, this limited-run publication features a new essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The text considers the history and evolution of the human desire to depict our surroundings, placing Andersson's doubled renderings--"pictures of pictures"--within a tradition of painting not from life but from representations of life.

About the Author

Born 1962 in Luleå, Sweden, Mamma Andersson studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm, from 1986 to 1993. She had her first museum solo exhibition in the United States at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, in 2010, and her first solo exhibition in Ireland at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 2009. In 2006, the artist won the Carnegie Art Award, a prestigious prize for Nordic contemporary painting, which received a corresponding exhibition that traveled extensively throughout Europe. In 2007, she was the subject of a critically acclaimed mid-career survey at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which traveled to the Kunsthalle Helsinki and the Camden Arts Centre, London. Her work was represented in the Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author. He became known worldwide for six autobiographical novels, titled 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.