Mamma Andersson — Galerie David Zwirner
Steeped in a gentle atmospheric romanticism and a sharp gift for transforming the everyday into the poetic spectacle of reverie, Mamma Andersson’s drawings at the David Zwirner Gallery unfold in a multitude of directions that feel both abundant and remarkably cohesive.
Responding directly to the gallery’s architecture and the flow of light through its great window, this dense selection reflects an attention to gesture, to the very act of studio practice, to a way of making that becomes part of the story being told.
Her solitary landscapes (always quietly alive), her still lifes charged with emotion, her everyday scenes shaped by an inner narrative, and her ambiguous dreamscapes all share a rare attentiveness to life’s fleeting details and vast distances. Absence and longing, in this context, become central characters. From something as simple as a single chair isolated against a trembling background (Daniel’s Chair), Andersson conjures a hollowed-out portrait of presence and loss. Her world, possessed by a kind of wistful fantasy, flirts with the surreal; a borderless realm where Dalí and De Chirico might share the neo-Gothic stage of a modern Renaissance.
A centerpiece of the exhibition, among other striking works, is the powerful series Scenes from a Marriage, which embodies this inextricable fusion of gesture and technique. The title, echoing Ingmar Bergman’s television series, reveals the artist’s fascination with human entanglement. The works themselves arose from the reuse of discarded fragments—“scraps,” reworked into a haunting variation on intimacy. The figures, spectral or insistent, reconstruct a domestic interior transformed by unseen tempests into a landscape of its own.
Moving through this nearly infinite narrative spectrum, Andersson’s distinctive touch and attention become, on every sheet, an event in themselves. The precision of her line, the tenderness of her figures, and the inventiveness of her color punctures create a carousel of images into which viewers dive; half-wary of their terrible seduction, yet willing, in the end, to be happily submerged.
Mamma Andersson, Œuvres sur papier, April 23rd — June 27th, 2026, David Zwirner gallery, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris
