“I paint slowly, gently, thin, beautiful, ugly, thick, hard. I love it, it’s my life. But I hate it too,” the Swedish artist Mamma Andersson has said. “It is a quiet, messy, illogical confusing disorder. It is here that dreams and the subconscious come in.” The wealth of art-historical references in Andersson’s paintings give viewers the illusion of stepping into a dream. Found photographs, films, and historical cuttings are embedded in the works, which Andersson paints over in multiple thin layers. Her landscapes and domestic scenes teem with folk and traditional Nordic elements. In this large-scale retrospective, Andersson’s poetic vision is the focus. As the Louisiana director, Poul Erik Tøjner, explains, “Mamma Andersson’s works somehow just seem to keep growing in the eye of the beholder.” —E.C.