This volume celebrates the Swedish artist Mamma Anderssons new body of workmelancholic, evocatively colored paintings that explore femininity, fantasy, and memory.
Anderssons 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 Hammershøi (18641916) and Edvard Munch (18631944). 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 artists 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.
