Sep 11, 2026

New Season, New Highlights – Mamma Andersson, "Vännen"

Offered for sale in Contemporary Art & Design

Signed Mamma Andersson and dated 1996 verso. Oil on canvas 128,5 x 147 cm

Mamma Andersson is regarded as one of Sweden's most acclaimed artists, known for her distinctive paintings and a career that has earned both national and international recognition.

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.

To Be Sold at Contemporary Art & Design

Estimate: 1 500 000 - 2 000 000 SEK

Viewing

October 22–26, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm

Live Auction

October 27–28, Arsenalsgatan 2, Stockholm

Accepting final consignments

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:

“This is the first version, and I used the same photograph as I did for 'Dagen efter'. I remember that there was a completely different painting underneath 'Vännen', which I painted over because I wasn’t satisfied with the first image. 'Vännen' was shown at Liljevalchs in the spring of 1996, in a group exhibition of contemporary Swedish art called 'Alone Together'. It, along with two other paintings of mine, was purchased by the gallerist Lars Bohman.

Jockum and I had bought a trip to Paris with the boys and couldn’t attend the opening. We stayed at a small hotel in Montmartre, ‘La Colette’. One night I dreamed that we were a large group walking around Liljevalchs. Ernst Billgren was our guide, and then we entered the room with my paintings and a lamp started flashing ‘Sold out, sold out.’ I told Jockum about the dream and we laughed. We really had a wonderful and loving trip to Paris. We wandered through the Surrealists’ park, Buttes-Chaumont, visited the catacombs, went up the Eiffel Tower, and rented a rowboat near the zoo. Then, when I returned home to Stockholm and went to Liljevalchs to see the exhibition, I met Folke Lalander, who was the director at the time. He spread his arms and said: ‘Karin, all your paintings have been sold.’ It’s strange, but I’ve had a few dreams like that that have come true. This was one of them.”

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:

“In the beginning, it was the landscapes that captivated me, the feeling of disappearing among her birch trees. Since then, in work after work, she has continued to tell stories about things that also have to do with my life, my world of imagination, and our shared time on earth.

Her complex interiors, her scenes of family life, of shadows and light, of dolls and statues, not only awaken spaces, memories, experiences and emotions of my own, but also put them at stake. In her images there are references to other artists and works of art that I have encountered since childhood, to films, stories and photographs that are a kind of shared cultural heritage for our generation. In her images I see my own time reflected in history, and this affects me in a particular way. Perhaps discovering an active artist of one’s own generation is something for which one should be deeply grateful.”

To Be Sold at Contemporary Art & Design

Estimate: 1 500 000 - 2 000 000 SEK

Now Accepting Final Consignments

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