Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks

While FotoFocus is well-known for embracing photography and lens-based art, this year’s biennial includes the Contemporary Arts Center’s unique exhibition of Swedish painter Mamma Andersson’s paintings. Painters often draw from existing visual materials, such as photographs and reproductions of past works of art, in order to inspire and assemble their work. Andersson, who is acclaimed for her dreamlike, delicately narrative compositions inspired by Nordic painting, folk art, newspaper photographs, and cinema, is no anomaly. Scattered throughout her exhibit Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks are multiple paintings of various subjects, such as people, animals, and objects. Viewers had to walk around the entire fourth floor in order to view the entire exhibit. The source material, photographs, was sealed inside of a glass display; at the end of the visit, it became obvious which references were utilized for each painting.

One work, The Lonely Ones (2008), is oil paint on a panel that is split into two, equal parts; it is approximately 50 ½ x 120 centimeters (Andersson). The piece has a coral orange background and a tan floor with a cream-colored rug in the bottom center; the paint appears to be scraped away — this is most prevalent near the outer edges of the composition. Upon first glance, both of these panels appear as if they are just images of an interior being reflected horizontally, but there are some slight variations in each painting. In the right panel, there is a dark brown cabinet with two candlesticks on top of it; a dark brown clock suspended on the wall; two, small stools; some plants, both potted and hanging; framed photographs on the wall, and a dark doorway with a maroon trim. In the left panel, there is the same cabinet only without the candlesticks; a goldenrod yellow clock; the same two stools; somer sparser plants; different photographs on the wall; and a doorway with a pale yellow trim. It is also apparent that the right panel is more faded and less vibrant than its left counterpart.

As stated earlier, painters create from ocular references. However, Andersson further transcends this process in the exhibit by importing images of stacks of books and stray photographs, which are extracted from various sources, directly into her painted compositions. It is with attentive observation that the artist’s dreamy landscapes and interiors — these are often combined — slowly come to reveal familiar imagery filtered through and sharing space with her muted color palette, melancholic scenery, and textural paint. Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks focuses on this aspect of Andersson’s painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriated imagery and collaged elements enlivens her paintings with an unearthly and uncanny sense of familiarity while indulging in wholehearted fantasy and suggestive narrative. This is apparent in The Lonely Ones as its subdued colors and contrasting halves present the viewer with a pensive mood and compel them to contemplate why Andersson made certain artistic choices.

In fact, Andersson’s paintings effectively play into the ideals of FotoFocus: to emphasize the centrality of photography and lens-based art to modernism. These paintings are in no way hyperrealistic in their appearance, and they still closely resemble works from the artist’s past exhibitions — moreover, they are able to utilize pictorial space and juxtapositions of thick paint and textured washes in a way that is uniquely her own. Andersson’s paintings bring color to and boldly stand out against the stark white walls on which they are displayed; they can make one overlook the fact that they were inspired by photographs and are not just original concepts. Unfortunately, there is no accompanying text for each painting, making it difficult to know the names and dimensions of each work; I could only find information for two out of over twenty paintings on the CAC website.

Overall, Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks is successful in offering a rather particular but fascinating insight into the mind of an established contemporary artist like Mamma Andersson. In regards to The Lonely Ones, which is split into contrasting half-versions, each of the two, imperfect panels is an inversion, improvement, or degradation of the other: colors change or are scraped away; and objects appear or disappear. Each take — like each of our memories — is no less of an invention than the next. We begin and end in such paintings with a movement between things, with a constant shifting between ideas and definitions and with an artistic preparedness for the loss, the mourning, and the repeated remaking of the everyday world.