Mamma Andersson

Mamma Andersson’s most recognizable images layer neat, well-appointed interiors with abstract, bleeding landscapes, improbably and enigmatically conflating nature and artifice. Following on the heels of the Swedish painter’s recent midcareer retrospective, “Cry” separates the domestic interior from the desolate exterior. Gone are the spectral figures, the overt art-historical quotations, and the ghostly black auras hovering in the picture plane; Andersson’s new work is more straightforward yet remains haunting and portentous: in a word, chilly.

Among the nine new paintings are barren winter vistas, composed of acrid colors and abstract forms, and diptychs of furnished rooms, filled with objects but devoid of human presence. Each two-panel work pairs an obliquely cropped household scene with its mirror image. Image and inverse converge at the center and radiate out, unfolding like a paper snowflake. But the pairs of panels provide distinct and dissimilar visions. In Hangover, 2008, for example, the left side evokes the work’s title: The windows are reduced to white rectangles (shorthand for bright light blinding bleary eyes), and color is applied sparingly, scrubbed into the rough, scratchy surface of the wood panel. The horizontally flipped version, though compositionally identical, is smoothly rendered in rich, deep hues. Sober and clear-sighted, the right side contrasts with the left’s more cursory, less accurate view. Challenging the authority of the image and the conceit of image-making, Andersson offers two perspectives, each overwhelmingly bleak.