CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/6/2015

Mamma Andersson & Jockum Nordström Book Signing at David Zwirner

This Friday, January 9, from 4-6 PM, join Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström signing copies of the eagerly awaited reprint of their classic book, Who Is Sleeping on My Pillow, at David Zwirner gallery, 19th Street, New York, where Andersson is the subject of a one-person show. (Nordström is the subject of a one-person show at the London Zwirner) gallery.

ABOVE: "Dead End" (2010) by Karin Mamma Andersson.

In his Introduction, Paolo Colombo writes, "Jockum Nordström’s paintings are inhabited by people, Karin Mamma Andersson’s paintings are mostly devoid of people. Mamma builds houses, Jockum inhabits them. She gathers, he hunts."

ABOVE: "Everything I Will Leave" (1999) by Jockum Nordström.

"Jockum conceives life as a fabric of relations; his works are about these relations, and about the latent structure that rules them. This structure is built by sexuality and social class, respectively the weave and the woof. He occasionally refers to an idealized past, a northern nowhere land where temperance is virtue, gentility the norm, and where boats sail the open seas, commerce is thriving, riders ride, men are chivalrous and women restrained. This is Jockum’s land of refuge, where anarchy and madness are temporarily being swept under the rug. We pretend to believe him, well knowing that he means otherwise, and that there is no rug large enough for the debris and the dust."

ABOVE: "Who Is Sleeping On My Pillow" (2010) by Karin Mamma Andersson.

"Mamma has no land of refuge, what we see is what it is. Her empty rooms are sets of contemporary plays, whose characters have just stepped out, leaving a faint scent of sweaters, fireplace, coffee. (What can one say of a painting where the light is the scent of clothes and the sound is that of muffled steps – where the viewer’s other four senses become one with seeing?) Over the years, since childhood and later at the academy, Mamma has looked at and has absorbed art. She also looks at plays and cinema, and listens to the sound of human voices in conversations, and observes the light of the morning and the darkness of night. Her paintings tell a tale of longing, and are permeated with a sense of fleeting time. If I think of a literary equivalent, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor by J.D. Salinger comes to mind."

ABOVE: "In the Forest of Death" (2001) by Jockum Nordström.

"The miracle is that Jockum and Mamma spent more than half of their life together, and that over the years their complicity has guided them into the artists they are, each the complement and the best sounding board for the other. And this is just the beginning of it."