David Zwirner gallery presents Who is sleeping on my pillow, new works by Swedish partners Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström.  Married for 24 years, they are exhibiting together for the first time with concurrent solo shows in opposite rooms of the gallery with collaborations in the Middle Gallery.

Jockum Nordström’s works on paper are crude and childlike but with a sophistication that’s hard to name.  He cuts paper figures, paints them with watercolor and glues them to watercolored paper.  The figures are cut too big and too small in the wrong places and they’re painted haphazardly.  But they are mesmerizing because of the way they are assembled and the stories they tell.  In Human Form Divine, Nordström assembles six vignettes; hunters shooting at the sky, a young girl riding away on a horse, and on the bottom right, a mother beating her naked toddler with a stick.  The “innocent” style of these collages gives way to darker stories of human interactions in nature.

Mamma Andersson’s paintings on panel evoke a similar kind of discomfort but she works in a different medium.  She mixes acrylic and oil on wood panel and so there is cracking in the surfaces.  Her earthen colors are similar to Nordström’s muted palate but she throws in bright washes in unexpected places in her work.  In Hallway, 2010, the far wall is painted in a washy fusia-red in an otherwise monotone long hallway space.  That wall holds a large window showing a white winter landscape outside.  This framed peak of the outside makes for an interesting focal point exposing the power of Nordic nature in this contained warm space. Andersson’s domestic spaces and landscapes often depict her native land “where summers are short and winters are long”.

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