Ulla Wiggen

Ulla Wiggen, born in 1942, is an artist with a sparse yet distinctive body of work. Between 1964 and 1969, she produced around thirty paintings, most of which depict the inner workings of electronic devices. Sometimes these are direct representations that reveal existing connections; at other times she assembled components from different sources. She would use images from specialised computer journals, freely chosing parts and combining them into her own new systems.

Wiggen was one of the first to claim the new electronic technology as a subject for painting. She was fascinated by the world of circuit boards and diagrams and was allowed to borrow a few to use as models in her painting. Her paintings from this period can be seen as images beneath the surface of an approaching digital world—at once portraits and painterly experiments situated in the borderland between concrete realism and abstraction.

The Swedish art critic Sebastian Johans, writing about Wiggen’s 2025 solo exhibition at Västerås Art Museum, observes:

"Seeing and using one's vision to orient oneself, rather than interpreting and understanding, appears to be at the core of Wiggen's images. Even her early technical images, which carefully observe and portray electronic components, electrical diagrams and the like, rely entirely on sight. They do not attempt to understand or reveal any meaning – the motifs are often composed in a way that does not reflect their function; the circuit diagram, for example, would lead to a short circuit. Rather, they look in order to familiarise themselves. So that what is being viewed does not appear alien. To create closeness. Not to completely bridge a distance, but to reduce it as much as possible. It is a very sympathetic approach. Fundamentally, we are all alone; that is our existential lot, but we can still stand side by side. And to get close, we must see.”

In the past decade, Wiggen has staged a remarkable comeback. Moderna Museet “rediscovered” her in 2013 when it exhibited her paintings from the 1960s and 70s in Moment – Ulla Wiggen. After a break of nearly thirty years, she returned to painting, this time turning inward to the body—depicting the brain, skeletal structures, ribs, and intestines.

In 2022, the year she turned eighty, Wiggen exhibited in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In the years leading up to that, she held several solo exhibitions, and in 2019 she appeared on the cover of the prestigious art magazine Artforum. Today, the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm includes both her early “electronic paintings" and her later works.