OUTSIDE / INSIDE
Fridericianum Kassel 2024
Text for the booklet
Magnus Schaefer
Surface and Depth
The first works by Ulla Wiggen that I saw were a group of her elegant and intricate mid-1960s electronics paintings, situated somewhere between modernist abstraction, technical drawings, and diagrams. It was only some time later, and with some surprise, that I learned about her other series, which seemed quite different at first sight: the portraits of friends and acquaintances she stated making in the 1970s, paintings from the 2010s based on medical imagery showing teeth, bones, and inner organs of the human body, and the most recent works, highly-enlarged depictions of human irises. Yet, diverse as they are, all these paintings evince Wiggen’s painterly precision, attention to detail, and interest in visually scrutinizing complex systems, from computers to human bodies and personalities.
And, while (or perhaps because?) Wiggen treats her imagery with such careful clarity, the paintings also appear intriguingly inscrutable. The surfaces they show and the connections they map out point to electronic, organic, and psychological processes. But they leave it up to viewers to picture the exact workings of these processes. In their very precision, they insist that there is more at play in them than mere visual facticity.
For her 1960s paintings, Wiggen attentively studied electronic components and schematics from the early digital computers that were then in development at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and other machines. Even with sufficient knowledge of electronics (which I don’t possess), it would, however, be beside the point to trace the possible functionality of the circuits she depicts in works such as Kretsfamilj (1964), Förstärkare (1964), and Kanalväljare (1967).
Wiggen’s paintings do not merely portray technological objects. With their meticulously balanced blocks of color, elegant lines, painterly facture, and the coarse texture of the medical gauze Wiggen used in lieu of canvas in the earlier ones, they foreground the aesthetic dimension of electronics. Machines, they suggest, aren’t reducible to sheer functionality. Contrary to common claims, technology does not exist in a neutral and objective realm separate from culture and subjective experience and decisions. Wiggen concluded this series with two paintings that move away from the diagrammatic logic of circuitry and explicitly situate technology in the world. Radar (1968) depicts a radar antenna, an enigmatic sculptural object filling almost the entire composition with a dense grid of horizontal and vertical lines, yet surrounded by slivers of blue sky. In Någonstans (1969), a no less enigmatic digital display showing the figure nine is suspended from a cable, against a background of clouds and sky.
Then, around 1970s, Wiggen shifted to a more traditional mode of portraiture harkening back to Renaissance painting—intimate and sympathetic, yet still as precise and attentive to detail as her works from the previous decade. In Horisonten (1969), Wiggen places her sitter, the art critic and writer Peter Cornell, in front of a seascape with a low horizon line and an enormous expanse of sky filling more than half of the canvas. His lips are slightly open and he gazes out of the painting into some distance, as if in deep thought. While what is going on in his mind is inscrutable to viewers, the vastness of the sea and the sky echo the profoundness of his thoughts. Cornell reappears in Framför dig from 1972. Here, Wiggen shows his face from up close (the title can be translated as “in front of you”) against a neutral, off-white background. Cornell’s green-brown eyes calmy meet the gaze of the viewer, animating this portrait with psychological depth that is invisible and unfathomable, yet clearly present.
Between the beginning of the 1980s and the early 2010s, Wiggen took an extended break from painting to focus on studying psychology and practicing psychotherapy.
She returned to painting with a series based on medical imagery, such as schematic depictions of teeth or sections of the brain. The soberness and diagrammatic mode of representation of these small-scale works recall her earlier paintings of electronics. Wiggen again juxtaposes visual acuity with an interest in what exists together with, yet somehow beyond the facticity of the visual. The 2014 painting Conscientia shows a brain set against the backdrop of a network of neurons and synapses. The brain figures as the locus of consciousness here, but the complex experience of this phenomenon eludes the intricate cortical folds and pathways of nerves that Wiggen’s image maps out. Reminiscent of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint’s early-twentieth-century cosmic diagrams, The Face of Mind (2016) superimposes the perfectly symmetrical silhouette of a brain section onto a luminous turquois background, suggesting a more allegorical portrayal of the relationship between positivist medical imagery and the depth of the human mind.
Wiggen’s most recent series, which she began in 2016, consists of enlarged depictions of human irises, rendered in intricate detail on circular panels with slightly irregular edges. The paintings share the same overall structure—deep black pupil in the center, surrounded by the frilly pupillary region, and then the collarette and the ciliary zone further out. But the individual patterns of each human iris are unique, making these paintings portraits of sorts. They are based on the eyes of friends and acquaintances of the artist, and some include the sitter’s first name in the title, for example, Iris XIV Hanna (2019). The enlarged irises veer between formal abstraction and the experience of looking deep into someone’s eyes and building an emotional connection with this other person—eyes are colloquially known as windows to the soul and often thought to inhabit a special position between the exterior of the physical world and the interior of the psyche. The uniqueness of iris patterns is also the basis for biometric identification technology using digital eye scans. These technologies collapse embodied experience into the functional and one-dimensional identity linking an image to a name in a database. Wiggen’s paintings, in contrast, insist that in scrutinizing the visual details of eyes, faces, organs, and circuits, viewers acknowledge the fundamental interrelations between surface and depth.
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