Iris XXVII Albin

Inspired by the overwhelming response to the exhibition Moment – Ulla Wiggen (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 13 April – 25 August 2013), the artist, once again, turned to easel painting full time. This time, with a focus on themes and motifs relating to the human body, Wiggen entered a whole new and previously unexplored Universe. It seems logical, really, considering her documented interest in construction and function, as well as her experiences in psychotherapy. Since 2016, it has been brains, eyes, and the connections between them, that have come to dominate her production. Ulla Wiggen told Sofia Curman in 2020 (published in the interview ‘Ulla Wiggen – Återkomsten’):

I had thought that I wanted to paint something with my eyes, based on what I had been through, that I was losing my sight. In addition, I had had surgery for cataracts. I had been seeing blurry for a long time and all of a sudden, I could see clearly, it was wonderful. I looked at eyes in anatomy books. But I thought it looked a bit disgusting – it didn’t attract me. But one morning it came to me, you know in that state between sleep and wakefulness: I’m going to paint an iris. And it had to be round, on a sawn panel, something I had just started to try instead of working on canvas.

When I painted the electronics paintings, I decided what the painting should look like, I drew and taped it up and then I painted it, full stop. Now I can just sit and mix and try a color for a whole day. I look a lot more now, change and add so that the painting can grow in a way that is unexpected to me. An iris painting generally takes one to two months to make.

Wiggen’s ex-husband, Peter Cornell, has described (‘Ulla Wiggen’s Gaze – A Poetics of Objectivity. A Biographical Sketch’, article in Ulla Wiggen, 2022) the circumstances surrounding the creation of these remarkable paintings:

Then suddenly everything focused on one single organ: the eye. Wiggen started photographing irises that she had noticed and become captivated by, belonging both to casual acquaintances and her friends; the individual colours of the irises, their mixes of colour, their clarity and contours. As basis for her paintings, she had MDF boards cut into slightly irregular circular shapes. There were several series and eventually the paintings came to be named after their models, and as such could be defined, once again, as a form of portraiture. […] The sizes are considerably larger than before and the even, flat surfaces from her earlier acrylic paintings have now been replaced by a subtle, translucent glazing in several layers of thin acrylic paint, like rivulets running from the precipitous darkness of the pupil. 

Wiggen’s current oeuvre seems more contemporary than ever. Sabeth Buchmann (Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) writes (‘Inside the [Painting] Machine’, article in Ulla Wiggen, 2022):

It is no surprise to me that Wiggen’s painting is currently receiving renewed attention, at a time when the co-constitution of the aesthetic and the technical is finding new significance in post-human and post-media discourses. It is as if Wiggen always understood her paintings to be interpretations of the techno-aesthetic organization of human sight; as Wiggen paints it, its mode of operation appears (un)ambiguously ambiguous.

Provenance

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Visionary Machineries, 8 July – 26 August 2023.

Firestorm (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions

Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, Ulla Wiggen. Outside / Inside, 24 February – 28 July 2024.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation