Paintings that shoot straight from the hip

VISUAL ARTS:THERE'S A CHILL in the air at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, where Mamma Andersson's exceptionally atmospheric paintings draw us into forlorn Nordic landscapes and disordered, usually deserted domestic interiors, charged with a feeling of edgy sadness. Messy rooms and wintry expanses tend to suggest lives in emotional disarray, especially when you take into account such titles as Hangover, The Lonely Onesand Cry. Yet Andersson's imaginative world comprises much more than a cliched rehash of Nordic stereotypes, of Munch-by-numbers or Bergman-lite.

“Mamma” is a self-adopted nickname that took the place of the more conventional Karin – too conventional for Andersson’s taste, in fact. A Swede, she has said that the Swedish phone book is chock-a-block with Karin Anderssons. She is also a mamma, as it happens. Born in 1962, in the northern, sub-arctic city of Lulea, she is now based in Stockholm. She had been painting and exhibiting for many years when her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2003 led to a breakthrough. Aware that, as a painter, she was something of an outsider in the critical orthodoxy of contemporary art, she had been apprehensive about Venice, but the response to her work there was tremendous. Amid critical plaudits, she was taken up by the David Zwirner Gallery in New York and went on to win a significant award in the US. A mid-career retrospective toured several venues and was extremely well received. She also shows with the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, the source of the Douglas Hyde exhibition.

Her work is very approachable because it is representational and on one level relatively direct, even though she doesn’t spell out the meaning of the scenes she depicts. She doesn’t really have to because we can grasp immediately that her subject is the familiarity and strangeness of everyday life.

Sometimes her imagery is quite pointed. A television set in The Lonely Onesis rendered as a dense black block, surmounted by candles and a golden chalice, as though it is an altar – the altar of popular cultural distraction, perhaps. The living room in Hangover, with clothing flung across chairs, cushions on the floor and a window wide open, is a morning-after-the-night-before scene.

On other occasions she is less specific about what might be going on, but not about what we are looking at. She is able to imbue even a neutral, workaday interior with a sense of drama, engaging our curiosity.

In fact Dollhouse, a large painting depicting three rooms, one atop the other, is set up very like a series of stage sets, and the women in period costume who feature in one of the rooms could be in a Strindberg or Bergman production. What matters is that a feeling of alertness attends even the unoccupied rooms, in which each piece of furniture, each detail, has a character, even a life, of its own. This holds as well for Andersson's landscapes, moody and slightly spooky vistas.

The surfaces of the paintings are extraordinary. Lumpy, patchy and uneven, there is an awkwardness about them that should stop them working, but doesn’t. In this they recall early Peter Doig, for the way he juxtaposed fat blobs of pigment with paint applied as thinly as watercolour. Again, as with Andersson, he liked dramatic tonal contrasts and surprising concentrations of intense colour, and looked to second-hand imagery for his sources.

Andersson works from photographs, though not her own. She seems to like a certain distance, scouring books, newspapers and magazines from the years of her childhood and adolescence for source material, though there’s absolutely nothing nostalgic about her work.

She was right to be a bit sceptical about her inclusion in the Venice Biennale. The idea of a low-key, introspective representational painter being acclaimed at Venice seemed very unlikely at the time, though it’s worth pointing out that when Robert Storr curated the 2007 Biennale and included a great deal of painting, it was very well received. And Andersson’s work can usefully be seen in the context of such contemporary artists as Doig, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans. Her show includes a great painting simply depicting a corner of a print workshop. It is entitled Labourious and might well encapsulate her own approach: hard work applied to ordinary life, to great effect.

BLAISE SMITH is a realist painter who has shown a particular empathy for rural Ireland – rural Ireland as it is, rather than any of various idealisations of it. He has in the past provided fine pictorial accounts not only of the countryside but also of farm buildings – domestic and utilitarian, of farm machinery and, in one series, of road-building machinery. It’s still a bit of a leap to his current show, Weapons, at the Molesworth Gallery (it’s already been seen at other venues throughout the country). The weapons are those held and employed by the Irish Defence Forces.

Each is depicted individually, straightforwardly: a Steyr assault rifle, a Browning automatic pistol, a bayonet, an artillery shell. In this, Smith is venturing into problematic territory. There is a thriving subculture that fetishises weaponry and militaria, and is bloodthirsty yet oddly divorced from the wretched realities of war. Clearly Smith runs the risk of pandering to such a mentality in isolating and examining machine guns and pistols.

In fact his work brings the subject down to earth. Depicted matter-of-factly in mundane settings, the weapons appear functional and ominous, but not glorified or fetishised. Like it or not, they are part of the fabric of the State, a necessary evil. Smith also depicts an armoured personnel carrier in UN livery, a salutary reminder of the prominent role Irish troops play in peace-keeping operations internationally.

He then shows us the people behind the weapons, with a portrait of an individual soldier and of a platoon section, kitted out in camouflage and fully armed. It’s a fascinating show and should stand as an illuminating and valuable record of a well-nigh invisible aspect of contemporary Ireland.

• Mamma Andersson, paintings, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, until Mar 18th. Weapons, paintings by Blaise Smith, The Molesworth Gallery, 16 Molesworth St, until Feb 27th