Karin Mamma Andersson has experimented with different materials and different painting techniques in different periods of her life as an artist. “Lillebror” the painting being auctioned, which is painted in oil on metal, is one such example. The technique is derived from seventeenth-century paintings on copper plate. Mamma Andersson herself described metal as an exciting material to work with, giving the paintings a sharper expression in relation to the more traditional canvas, and allowing a different kind of sheen to emerge.

In the painting “Lillebror”, we find two children, captured in the moment. Children are a frequent subject in Mamma Andersson’s paintings from the 1990s. Andersson adopted the middle name Mamma in the early 1990s towards the end of her studies at
Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art to distinguish her from an artist with the same name. The subjects of her paintings tend to be drawn from the environment in which Mamma Andersson was living at the time, and, as a mother, children were a very central element in her life during this period. She was largely surrounded by boys of this age and they thus became a recurring subject in her paintings, like the not infrequent landscape of Norrland and the graphic black and white birch trees. The children are often depicted in movement, dancing or playing, but often enclosed in their own worlds. In “Lillebror” we find the boys in a world of their own, in their own imaginations, building something they have invented.

In the book “Mamma Andersson” published in conjunction with the major exhibition at Moderna Museet in 2007, the artist herself describes this period of her life in a conversation with Lars Norén: “If you ask me to think about how I painted in the nineties, when I was still naive, which is very beautiful, incredibly blunt and with no smartness at all? Well there were a lot of children in almost all of my paintings then. I realise I was painting my situation, the only subject I had access to, the children and the place where we lived. I was, after all, the mother of two children and I was relating to them all the time.”