Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm) made her debut in the early 1960s with her much noticed ‘electronic series’. During a period between 1963 and 1969 she created about thirty of these paintings, including the painting in the auction ‘Sändare’ [Transmitter], from 1968. Wiggen’s unique post-mortem of technology creates an exciting encounter between the recognisable and the brand new.
In the last ten years Wiggen has made a remarkable comeback. In 2013 Moderna Museet ‘rediscovered’ Wiggen as they exhibited her paintings from the 1960s and 70s in the exhibition ‘Moment – Ulla Wiggen’. After a pause of nearly thirty years she began painting again. She now finds her subjects within the body – be it the brain, parts of the skeleton, ribs or intestines. Yet the paintings still resemble the electronic series in their construction. In 2016 Wiggen made her first painting of an eye’s iris, a series of works for which she has recently gained a lot of attention. The depictions take several months to finish due to their precision and exactness, painted as they are with the very finest of brushes.
In 2022, the same year that Wiggen celebrated her 80th birthday, she exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Prior to this she had had several solo shows and in 2019 was on the cover of the prestigious art magazine Artforum. Included in Moderna Museet’s collections are both older electronics paintings and newer pieces depicting irises. In 2023 twenty large reproductions of her work will be on show on the walls of Gärdet underground station in Stockholm.
The painting in the auction, ‘Sändare’, was executed during a period after Wiggen had spent time in New York and worked as an assistant to Öyvind Fahlström. Fahlström had asked Wiggen if she wanted to work for him at a party at the home of the then director of Moderna Museet, Pontus Hultén. When she finally arrived in New York she quickly became part of the art scene there and the years between 1965 and 1966 came to shape her as an artist. After her 1968 debut exhibition at Galerie Prisma in Stockholm, where she showed her electronics series, she abandoned that body of work in place of the portraits that would come to distinguish her painting throughout the 1970s. Today we are fascinated by the way Wiggen chose to depict electronic components and circuit boards so early on, and how she was already then ahead of her time.