Seasonal affective disorder

There's a kind of cold, seasonal beauty in these landscape paintings by Swedish artist Mamma Andersson - although they conspicuously lack the jolly Christmas-card quality we like to associate with this time of year. The light in her paintings is melancholic, helping the artist to create spaced out, disassociated and hungover moods. (Actually, these moods probably are extremely seasonal, come Boxing Day). Her interiors are more reassuring, until the absence of people brings an uneasy feeling of existential loneliness. In her fine explorations of the sweetly glorious, the desolate and the sad, it seems an unsettled world that Andersson depicts.
Neal Brown