Inspired by filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, Karin Mamma Andersson’s compositions are often dreamlike and expressive. While stylistic references include turn-of-the-century Nordic figurative painting, folk art, and local or contemporary vernacular, her evocative use of pictorial space and her juxtapositions of thick paint and textured washes is uniquely her own. Her subject matter revolves around evocative, melancholic landscapes and nondescript, private interiors.

Andersson was born in 1962 in Luleå, Sweden. She studied from 1986 to 1993 at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she continues to live and work.

Since 2004, Andersson’s work has been represented by David Zwirner. Behind the Curtain marked her third solo exhibition at the gallery in New York, on view January through February 2015. Previous shows include Who is sleeping on my pillow (2010), a two-person exhibition with Jockum Nordström, and Rooms Under the Influence (2006), which marked the artist’s United States debut.

In 2011, Andersson’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. She had her first museum solo show in the United States at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado in 2010, and her first solo exhibition in Ireland at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin in 2009. In 2007, a critically acclaimed, mid-career survey of her work was organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which traveled to Kunsthalle Helsinki and the Camden Arts Centre, London.

In 2006, the artist won the Carnegie Art Award, a prestigious prize for Nordic contemporary painting, which received a corresponding exhibition that traveled extensively throughout Europe. Her work was represented in the Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.

Work by the artist is represented in museum collections that include the Dallas Museum of Art; Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Västerås Konstmuseum, Sweden.