Ulla Wiggen

Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942, Stockholm) made her debut in the early 1960s with her highly acclaimed “electronic paintings”. Between 1963 and 1969 she created around thirty of them. Wiggen's peculiar autopsy of technology creates an exciting encounter between something recognizable and something new.
In the last ten years, Wiggen has made a grand comeback. Moderna Museet “rediscovered” Ulla Wiggen in 2013 when they exhibited her paintings from the 1960s and 70s in the exhibition “Moment - Ulla Wiggen”. After a break of almost thirty years, she started painting again. She now finds her subjects inside the body, be it the brain, skeletal parts, ribs or intestines. In 2016, Wiggen painted her first iris, the paintings for which she is so well known today. The depictions take months to complete, they are so precise and exact, painted with the smallest brush. The auction's work “Iris III” from 2017 is one of the earlier irises that can also be seen as realistic portraits.

In the same year that Ulla Wiggen turned 80, she exhibited at the main exhibition of the 2022 Venice Biennale. In the years before that, she had several solo exhibitions and in 2019 she graced the cover of the prestigious art magazine Artforum. Moderna Museet's collections include both older electronic paintings and works depicting irises. Ulla Wiggen is currently having a solo exhibition at Västerås Art Museum.