News/reviews
Radical Software:
Women, Art & Computing1969 - 1991
MUDAM
Musée d´Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
20 september -2 februari 2025
Luxemburg
Kunsthalle Wien
28 februari - 25 maj 2025
Österrike
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PASSAGE
Retrospektiv utställning med 40 målningar
från 1963 fram till nu.
EMMA
Espoo Museum of Modern Art
18 september - 26 januari 2025
Espoo
Finland
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Retrospektiv utställning med 60 målningar
från 1963 fram till nu.
Fridericianum
23 februari - 28 juli 2024
Kassel
Tyskland
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Elektronmusikstudion - konst, teknik och politik
1 dec 2023 - 1 sep 2024
Stockholm
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5 november 2023
Hans Majestät Konungen
överlämnar personligen medaljen den 22 november
på Stockholms slott.
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Kom som du är!
... och andra nyförvärv
Skissernas Museum
12 oktober - 18 februari 2024
Lund
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Happily Ever After
Malmö Konstmuseum
27 oktober - 30 mars 2024
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Cycle, Portal, Path
Nest
13 oktober - 7 januari 2024
Haag
Holland
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VISIONARY MACHINERIES
Separatutställning
8 juli - 26 augusti 2023
Berlin
Tyskland
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Stockholms stads
Hederspris / Konst
tilldelas 2023
Ulla Wiggen
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DN.
Kulturpriset 2023/Konst
Ulla Wiggen
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Evigt Liv
Nobel Prize Museum
Liljevalchs
1 oktober 2023 - 29 januari 2023
Stockholm
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Motstånd
Åke Hodells utställning
kompletterad med 8 av Ulla Wiggens elektronikmålningar
Malmö Konsthall
19 mars - 22 maj 2022
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Konstnärskapet avsnitt 17
Ulla Wiggen. Venedig förändrade något för alltid
Producerat av Sofia Curman
tillsammans med Tomas Rajnai och Jens Nielsen
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The Milk of Dreams
La Biennale di Venezia 2022
23 april - 27 noveber
Italien
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Party for Öyvind
Museum Tinguely, Basel
15 februari - 1 maj 2022
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Worlds of Networks
CENTRE POMPIDOU
Paris
23 februari - 25 april 2022
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Art Basel
Galerie Buchholz
24 - 26 september 2022
Basel
Schweiz
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Market Art Fair
Belenius
17 - 19 september 2021
Stockholm
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Heat & Energy
11 september - 17 oktober 2021
Kummelholmen
Vårberg
Sweden
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Party for Öyvind
9 september - 23 januari 2022
Sven-Harrys konstmuseum
Museum Tinguely, Basel
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BLICK
Separatutställning
BELENIUS
26 september - 3 oktober 2020
Stockholm
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LULEÅBIENNALEN 2018
17 november - 17 februari 2019
Luleå Konsthall
Luleå
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18 januari - 17 februari 2018
Galleri Belenius
Stockholm
Sweden
"Gå och se Ulla Wiggens utställning ögonaböj", Clemens Poellinger, Svenska dagbladet
"Sagolik superrealism i storformat", Birgitta Rubin,Dagens Nyheter.
"En skymt av tillvarons mysterier", Silva Malmsten, Omkonst
"Människan i ett nötskal", Andreas Mangione, Kunstkritikk
"Ulla Wiggen på Belenius", Andreas Gedin. Konsten.net
"Sfären och cirkeln", Peter Cornell, Konsten.net
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The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed:
Art in the age of Artificial Intelligence
21 september - 19 november 2017
Bonner Kunstverein
Bonn
Tyskland
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999
9 september - 24 september 2017
Skjul fyra sex
Göteborg
Sweden
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Secondhand daylight
6 juni - 9 juli 2017
Kummelholmen
Vårberg
Sweden
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Andra sidan skiftet
31 maj - 20 augusti 2017
Bonniers Konsthalll
Stockholm
Sweden
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CHRONOS
4 april - 6 maj 2016
Minibar
Stockholm
Sweden
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Drömvärldar -
Magi, fantasi och drömmar
ur samlingen.
23 mars 2016 - 4 juni 2017
Västerås Konstmuseum
Västerås
Sweden
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Pris från Konstakademien
19 februari 2016
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Ropen skalla
Konsten åt alla
UPPTÄCK MALMÖ KONSTMUSEUMS SAMLING 1960-1980
12 februari - 15 maj 2016
Malmö Konstmuseum
Malmö
Sweden
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Technologism
2 okt - 12 dec 2015
MUMA
Monash University Museum of Art
Melbourne
Australia
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Intra
23 april - 30 maj 2015
S.P.G.
Susanne Pettersson Gallery
Stockholm
Sweden
The exhibition Intra, is Ulla Wiggen’s artistic comeback. In the 1960s, her paintings, which also received international attention, were based on circuit boards, computers, and electronic components. It was shown in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013.
The paintings were created in the same era as the project Experiments in Art and Technology, in New York. Ulla Wiggen took part in Oyvind Fahlström's "Kisses Sweeter than Wine” at that time. The following year, she painted a series of portraits that placed her amongst photo realists, like Ola Billgren and Jan Håfström.
At the SPG, she has shown a new series of paintings where she turns her perspective from computers and human external, to a hidden world of the body's interior: Intra. She draws from photographs and X-ray images of the internal body, which she combines freely, in a colourful, mysterious, and surreal object. Is this portrayed on a micro level or in an astronomical space? The paintings of the human organs form self-regulating cybernetic systems, like electronics, in her earlier paintings. In it, primitive organs reflect a spiritual place and dimension.
The exhibition runs until may 23.
På 60-talet har jag utgått från en motivvärld av kretskort, datorer och elektroniska komponenter som kan ses som förlängning av det mänskliga medvetandet utanför kroppen. Nu har jag i stället vänt blicken inåt och hämtar mina motiv från organ och vävnader inuti människans kropp, en värld som för mig framstår som lika saklig och gåtfull som de elektroniska kretsloppen i de tidigare målningarna. De två motivkretsarna har en gemensam nämnare i att de framställer ett slags självreglerande cybernetiska system där vetenskap och fri konst blandas, möts, kolliderar och förenas.
Min intention är att förhålla mig lika fritt till mitt nya inomkroppsliga material som till förlagorna till mina elektroniska målningar och då beröra områden som kroppsmedvetande, den medicinska blicken, organen som metaforer och människans fantasier om det inre som en mikro- eller makrovärld. Jag vill skapa en egen, konstnärligt koncipierad värld av vetenskap och fiktion, väsensskild från de anatomiska planschernas rent illustrativa och pedagogiska funktion.
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Om Ulla Wiggen, a dialogue between the critics Peter Cornell and Frans Josef Petersson, with an in-depth contextualisation and discussion of her oeuvre, is published in the series Moderna Museet Essä in conjunction
with the exhibition "Moment Ulla Wiggen".
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13.4-25.8 2013
Moderna Museet
Stockholm
Sweden
In Moment exhibitions the artworks determine place and time: a wall or several rooms, a day or some months.
INTRODUKTION
Machines and mechanical contraptions have been prominent at Moderna Museet from day one. In the late 1950s, Fylkingen – an association for new electronic music and intermedia art – began organising concerts at the Museum. In 1961, Pontus Hultén launched the exhibition Movement in Art, where the main tenet was the machine as a revolutionary force in 20th century art. In order to give artists access to technological expertise, the engineer Billy Klüver founded E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology, which organised 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in New York in 1966, featuring Öyvind Fahlström’s multimedia performance Kisses Sweeter than Wine and in 1973, the exhibition New York Collection for Stockholm at Moderna Museet.
Ulla Wiggen was in the midst of these events. She completed her first paintings in 1963 – 1964 in Stockholm: three small gouaches on gauze of electronic components, circuit boards and the inside of an amplifier. In the autumns of 1965 and 1966, she assisted Fahlström in his New York studio and took part in the above-mentioned performance. Influenced by the American art scene, Wiggen went over to acrylic paints and began working in larger formats. But her circle of motifs remained the same until 1968, when she gradually switched from close-up studies of the inner landscapes of electrical appliances to portraits of people, via spatial depictions of technical equipment against blue skies, such as the radar mast in Radar (1968). Between 1963 and 1969, Wiggen made some 30 paintings. The exhibition features selected works from this period.
How, then, do Wiggen’s works relate to the highly-technological surroundings? In Movement in Art, Pontus Hultén describes a romantic relationship to technology as a potentially utopian or dystopian force:
“If we believe in life or art, we clearly must gain total dominance over the machines,
subject them to our will and govern them so that they serve life in the most effective
way. In the planning of such a world, and as a means of achieving it, artists are more important than politicians or even technicians.”
This way of seeing technology as a tool in a new world, a view typical of the era, does not seem quite as relevant to Ulla Wiggen. On the contrary, she appears both more down to earth, openminded and more detached from such ideological aspects. Nor does she use technology in her practice; it is merely observed and represented, using conventional methods.
Nor does Wiggen share the fad for machines and their associations with production, work and sexuality – her attention is aimed primarily at electronics and a dawning digital world of a more immaterial and communicative nature. Her fascination for these “anatomical” electronic landscapes appears to rest on two factors that can push the interpretation of her works in different, and overlapping, directions:on the one hand, a strong interest in what the motif could represent (signals, inter- dependence, connections in the technical links, that each detail can perform a vital purpose in a larger system), and on the other her focus on the formal qualities, such as found shapes corresponding to a landscape or still life (colour, form, tactility, composition, beauty), distinctly reproduced in the painting itself.
If we look at how Ulla Wiggen’s work has been received, it is hardly surprising to find a heterogeneous picture. Interpretations span from technology romanticism to technological critique; from claims of absolute objective realism to symbolic mysticism. Analyses based on studies of 1960s cybernetics and structural linguistics alternate with references to classic existentialism and artists such as Chardin and Cézanne. Interestingly, all these interpretations, even the most contradictory ones, seem somehow reasonable and valid. Most readings agree, however, that the works, even though they lack figurative characters, have an immediate human relevance, either through anthropomorphosis of the machines, or as dealing with the complex relationship between man and machine.
Ulla Wiggen’s idiosyncratic oeuvre touches on many of the coordinates that are habitually used to “comprehend” art history – the machine theme, pop, minimalism, new objectivism, photo-realism– but Wiggen does not comply with any of these constructs. This could be one of the reasons why she has evaded the historiographical radar for so long, but it is also why her works never feel dated – unlike classic pop art and many of the machines and apparatuses that were featured in Movement in Art, Ulla Wiggen’s works feel vibrantly up-to-date today in 2013.
Curator: Fredrik Liew
Ulla Wiggen was born in Stockholm in 1942. In 1967 – 1972, she was enrolled at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her first exhibition and breakthrough took place in 1968 at Galleri Prisma in Stockholm, while she was still a student. That year, she also took part in Cybernetic Serendipity. The Computer and the Arts at the ICA in London. At the time, Ulla Wiggen was involved in Fylkingen, an association for new music and intermedia. She participated in the exhibition Public Eye at Kunsthaus in Hamburg in 1968. From the late 1970s, she devoted herself increasingly to her profession as a psychotherapist. The gallery Ynglingagatan 1 in Stockholm exhibited her work in 1995. Ulla Wiggen is represented in the Moderna Museet collection by the paintings Simultaneous Interpretation (1965) and TRASK (1967). The latter was acquired at her first exhibition in 1968 and was shown in 2012 as part of Ghosts in the Machine at the New Museum in New York, curated by Massimilano Gioni.