Mamma Andersson features in 'Impressions: Five Centuries of Woodcuts'

Mamma Andersson is included in an exhibition at The National Gallery Oslo which surveys the history of woodcuts. With varying degrees of popularity, the age-old woodcut technique has been in use since the sixteenth century, and there seems recently to be a renewed interest in this art form. Titled ‘Impressions: Five Centuries of Woodcuts' the exhibition studies the connection between today's digitized visual media and the traditional woodcut.

Alongside contemporary practitioners such as Mamma Andersson, the show looks at how artists such as Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin used the wood block's structure and growth ring pattern as an aesthetical element in their woodcuts. ‘Impressions' reveals the tremendous variation in the use of lines and surfaces, from Albrecht Dürer's thin, meticulous linework to Emil Nolde's rougher and more angular forms. Another theme in the exhibition is the technique's inherent possibilities when it comes to the use of colour, as can be seen in the sophisticated nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts and later on in works by Nikolai Astrup and Hanne Borchgrevink.

6 November 2015–24 January 2016