Her international career gained momentum in 2003, when she represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale. In 2006 she received the Carnegie Art Award, followed in 2007 by a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Since then her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions around the world. At the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 2018, she took on the dual role of artist and curator. In 2021, she became the first living Swedish artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

In 2023, a major exhibition was held at David Zwirner gallery in Paris, which represents Andersson alongside Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm. This spring, she held her sixth solo exhibition at the Paris gallery.

Mamma Andersson’s paintings are personal, but not private. Scenes from everyday life, classrooms, or the autumn landscapes of northern Sweden are subjects that we can all relate to. Her works are composed of fragmented scenes from life, brought together to form new images. Her inspiration comes from music, film, books, photographs, nature – a mental and physical collection of motifs and situations that she recreates with the brush. Among the artists who have inspired her over the years are Carl Fredrik Hill, Ivan Aguéli, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Dick Bengtsson.

During the 1990s, landscapes of memory, with their white birch trees and the silhouettes of the mountains, constituted a major part of Mamma Andersson’s painting. Over the years, her subject matter has shifted and expanded to include interiors and objects such as sculptures and furniture. The birch trees of the 1990s became a defining feature of Andersson’s art. The birch is one of the most common deciduous trees in northern Sweden and is connected to her own childhood, when her father enjoyed crafting objects from birch bark. The white trunks of the birch trees form a striking graphic element in the landscape, and their structure and black markings remind the artist of eyes – as if the birch trees have a gaze that observes us.

Mamma Andersson has spoken about how, in the painting “Vännen” (The Friend), she used a cover photograph from a book about Hälsingland as her starting point. She has often returned to this particular book, and twenty-five years later she revisited the motif and created the painting “Dagen efter” (The Day After), a more abstract and pared-down version that was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and was subsequently donated by the artist to the museum’s collection.

In the book "Samtalen: en bok om och med Mamma Andersson" (Naumann & Andersson, 2023, s. 129), Mamma Andersson recounts how “Vännen” came about:

The combination of portraiture and landscape was common in the artist’s work during the 1990s. The girls in the painting appear anonymous and somewhat shy. The themes are coming of age and relationships, primarily relationships between women. In several paintings, three girls or young women reappear, breaking away from the group; the motif originates from a photograph that has stayed with the artist over the years. The same composition can be seen, for example, in the work “All They Had To Do Was Dream” from 2001.

In “Samtalen: en bok om och med Mamma Andersson” (Naumann & Andersson, p. 15), Cilla Naumann writes beautifully about how Mamma Andersson’s paintings evoke feelings of recognition and about the emotional chords they strike in the viewer:

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