Ulla Wiggen

In the 1960s (1963 – 1969), self–taught artist, Ulla Wiggen painted, some thirty, detailed yet enigmatic images of the insides of electronic devices (one of these extraordinary paintings, TRASK, 1967, acrylic on masonite, 160.3 x 89.5 cm, was acquired by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in connection with her breakthrough exhibition at Galleri Prisma, Stockholm in 1968). She portrayed circuit boards and computer elements in a time when few suspected the future importance of this technology. Even then, she was considering looking inside the human body, but that project was put on hold when Wiggen gave up art and started working as a psychotherapist. Wiggen did not return to painting and studies of the human body until the early 2010s. Her focus soon moved to the eye, particularly the iris and pupil, the boundary between the world outside and inside, both physically and mentally. With her precise paintings, Wiggen seeks to create order in the intangible inner life that goes on under the surface.

In 1967 - 1972, Ulla Wiggen was enrolled at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Sofia Curman writes (in ‘Ulla Wiggen – Återkomsten’, 2020):

She didn’t understand the point of going to art school to learn something she had done all her life. She painted the electronics paintings in the same way she still paints: “with small brushes and great patience”. And combined with the right contacts, it worked well. Just a few years after the tentative start, she had the opportunity to go to New York and work for Öyvind Fahlström. […] Ulla Wiggen spent two autumns in a row in New York. That became her education. From Öyvind Fahlström she learned that the only thing that matters if you want to succeed as an artist is to work hard and incessantly. And she got practical tips to move forward faster.

In 1966 Wiggen participated in Öyvind Fahlström’s (1928 – 1976) performance for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering– the mythical and cult festival initiated by Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) and where inter-disciplinary art was perhaps born in earnest – and she often attended parties by various artists such as Claes Oldenburg (1929 – 2022) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997) as well as in Andy Warhol’s (1928 – 1987) The Factory.

From the late 1960’s Wiggen turned her back on the “electronic” compositions and instead concentrated on portraits (often depicting boyfriend/husband Peter Cornell [born 1942, former professor at the Royal Institute of Art, author, art critic and Wiggen’s husband between 1971 and 1975] in compositions like Horisonten, 1969, acrylic on panel, 75 x 52 cm). This was also when she trained as a psychotherapist, a profession she practiced, in parallel with painting, until the early 2020s.

In the 2010s, having painted only sporadically for 30 years, she once again made art her full time vocation (in the wake of her highly successful exhibition of early works, Moment – Ulla Wiggen, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2013). The year before she had also been included in the Ghosts in the Machine exhibition at the New Museum in New York. From portraits, she now moved on to the human body and its internal organs, especially brains and the iris of the eye (since the 2020s, she has focused solely on painting irises and pupils).

Further recognition came in 2019 when (in connection with the group exhibition Vista View at Galerie Buchholz, New York) one of her “electronic paintings” from the 1960s (Kanalväljare, 1967, acrylic on wood panel, 60 x 80 cm) grazed the cover of the incredibly prestigious magazine Artforum (Volume 58, Issue 03, November 2019). Wiggen was (positively) shocked by the cover and was “not herself for two weeks”. Inside the magazine, art historian and philosopher, Ina Blom (Wigeland Visiting Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Chicago) states that Wiggen’s paintings open up a narrative on “girls and technology” referring to:

[…] the long history of women as members of the workforce in the electronic industries, for instance, their labor in this capacity recalling the disciplined, quiet meticulousness associated with women’s crafts — the countless generations of nimble hands and keen eyes engaged in the most intricate needlework or weaving — represented today by images of female workers in factories in China or Vietnam assembling tiny mobile-phone components on grueling twelve-hour shifts.

Blom goes on to write that Wiggen’s technical abstractions bypass the “human sensorium” to convey an engagement with the “unknowable” aspects of electronic technology, revealing its “deepest secrets”.

In 2022 Wiggen’s work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale and in 2024 Fridericianum Museum, Kassel, Germany and EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art), Espoo, Finland mounted solo exhibitions dedicated to Ulla Wiggen. In connection with the exhibition Ulla Wiggen Outside / Inside, Fridericianum Museum wrote:

The work of the artist, who was born in 1942 in Stockholm, is characterized by outstanding formal and conceptual acuity. Spanning six decades, Wiggen’s oeuvre comprises four distinct bodies of paintings: renderings of circuit boards and other electronic components, portraits, medical imagery showing bones and inner organs of the human body and works that focus on the iris of the eye. Formally, these diverse motifs are united by Wiggen’s painterly refinement and attention to detail. Conceptually, they evince her interest in visually probing the workings of complex systems, from computers to human minds and bodies.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation