Mamma Anderson: Adieu Maria Magdalena

David Zwirner Books, 2025, hardcover, 56 pages, 23.5 x 29.85 cm

Adieu Maria Magdalena considers recurring themes and motifs from Mamma Andersson’s oeuvre and suggests complex and potent feelings related to loss.

Finding inspiration in work by other Scandinavian painters, including Carl Fredrik Hill and Vilhelm Hammershøi, Andersson explores the tension between interiority and the external world, imbuing her compositions with a haunting stillness and introspection. Departing from earlier oil-on-board paintings, the paintings in this body of work primarily utilize canvas, a support that allows Andersson to create at a larger scale and expand compositional possibilities within the pictorial space. Employing trompe l’oeil, the artist produces a subtly claustrophobic effect in domestic spaces by layering uncanny interior scenes taken from her own home and her imagination, an interplay of surfaces and imagery that probes the nature of representation.