Vestibulum

Signed and dated, “Ulla Wiggen 2013”, lower right corner.

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 however seems logical, really, considering her documented interest in construction and function, as well as her experiences in psychotherapy.

Since 2016 Wiggen’s output has been dominated by depictions of brains and eyes (and the connections between them). Her ex-husband, Peter Cornell (born 1942, former professor at the Royal Institute of Art, author, art critic), writes (‘Ulla Wiggen’s Gaze – A Poetics of Objectivity. A Biographical Sketch’, article in Ulla Wiggen, 2022):

In 2013 Wiggen returned to painting. She now turned her gaze away from the inner workings of computers and the outward form of humans to instead focus on their inner physicality, on the body’s organs, painted from x-ray images and anatomical posters. The soft organs create, just like the machines did, perfect cybernetic cycles: intestines, nerve fibres, blood vessels, brain and gut are all part of a connected communication system – as long as they are not afflicted by any external catastrophic disruptions.

The paintings of the 2010s broke new ground for Wiggen and would lead to the immensely popular Iris paintings a few years later. Wiggen’s exploration of the painterly medium had begun (as a self-taught artist) with the now legendary “electronic paintings” in the 1960s (Wiggen was, as pointed out by Peter Cornell, “one of the first to claim the new electronic technology as a subject for painting. She had a purely intuitive feeling that these objects represented a digital revolution to come, and this was at a time when not even IBM thought personal computers had a future”) and their meticulous depictions of circuit boards, wiring diagrams and other components.

Wiggen later, in the 1970s, turned her attention to portraits: a shift away from the inner workings of digital machines to the outward classical depiction of skin and flesh. When Wiggen returned to painting, many decades later, she penetrated the outer layers of the human body in order to explore the dynamic processes at work under the skin. Cornell, once again, writes:

Here she introduces a new volume and a spatial depth to her images, with the organs being placed in a different scenographic spatiality to before. The paintings are like expeditions into an unknown world, a material, but invisible, part of the ‘I’. They contemplate the body’s inner landscape and movements, sometimes like an elevated symmetry, as in Vestibulum, sometimes as an amusing variety, as in Sorores, or sometimes reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s shameless fleshiness, as in Processum, or of the cerebral hemispheres, as in the ambiguous Golem.

Provenance
Belenius, Stockholm.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Literature
Ulla Wiggen, 2022, mentioned p. 12 and illustrated full page in colour, p. 71.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation