Weekly Perusables: Mamma Andersson





Swedish painter Mamma Andersson creates ghostly, melancholic landscapes and interiors. Many of her interiors depict layers fading into each other, with inside and outside merging, bringing to mind a camera obscura and the work of Abelardo Morell. Painters will find her technique particularly interesting because of the way her oils and acrylics appear by turns washed out and rich. She also employs the decalcomania technique, once popular with Max Ernst and other Surrealists. You can see how her work progresses between the two books in our collection, with the compositions becoming more complex and colors more considered in her recent work.


Mama Andersson
ND793 .A54 A4 2010 (Stacks)
ND793 .A54 A4 2007 (Special Collection)

Image from David Zwirner

(blog entry by Jessica Sowls)

Weekly Perusables: Atlas

This week's title is Gerhard Richter's Atlas in celebration of the artist's 80th birthday. Richter is a German artist best-known for his paintings from the '60s and '70s that reproduced photographs in gray-scale as an effort to create an objective, pure painting he felt was missing in the abstract work of the period. Various styles and subject matter are found in his later work, including abstracts and landscapes.

Richter began Atlas in 1961 as an archive of sources for his paintings. The photographs, clippings, and sketches are arranged onto grid-like panels, and are presented this way in the book and when shown in galleries. The collection has been continuously added to, and now can be viewed online. The more than 40 years of collection and arrangement is pretty intriguing in itself, but Atlas is also an enlightening backdrop to the artist's work, reflecting the shifts in his subject matter and style.

Atlas
by Gerhard Richter
N7433.4.R528 A4 2006

Sources
www.gerhard-richter.com
Lucius Grisebach. "Richter, Gerhard." Grove Art Online.
Image from www.gerhard-richter.com

(blog entry by Sara O'Sha)