Mamma Andersson & Jockum Nordstrom: Who is sleeping on my pillow

Book excerpt: Originally published on the occasion of the 2010 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, Who is sleeping on my pillow marked the first time Andersson and Nordstrom presented their work in concurrent solo shows. The book showcases their work from the late 1980s to 2010 in over two hundred full-color plates, as well as numerous reproductions of family snapshots and source material. The Swedish artist couple Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom have been at the forefront of contemporary figurative art since the late 1980s. Updating Vuillard for a post-Hitchcock age, Andersson paints beguilingly eerie interiors and landscapes. Nordstrom’s detailed collages, watercolors, and drawings occupy a more folkloric realm peopled by historical and contemporary characters enacting sexual and social roles across broad narrative panoramas. Included in Who is sleeping on my pillow are texts by Paolo Colombo and Anders Kruger, a poem by Stig Claesson, and an interview with Nordstrom by Marcel Dzama. As Colombo notes in his accompanying essay, “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.” The publication was reissued to coincide with Nordstrom’s 2014 exhibition, For the insects and the hounds, at David Zwirner in London, and Andersson’s 2015 presentation, Behind the Curtain, at the gallery in New York.