Ulla Wiggen b. 1942

Ulla Wiggen started her career in the beginning of the1960s, painting in a highly matter of fact technique the new world of electronic components and digital equipment – at once strictly objective and enigmatic. She was a pioneer exploring this subject at a time when hardly anybody could forsee the digital revolution, thus confirming Marshall McLuhan´s words: ”the artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs.” In 1966 she took part in the legendary Experiments in Art and Technology in New York as an assistant to Öyvind Fahlström, whose radical approach to art was a decisive inspiration in Ulla Wiggen´s artistic development.

 

In the 1970s, parallel to her work as a psychotherapist, she painted a serie of portraits, factual and secretive as her electronic components.

 

In recent years her focus has shifted from the inside of computers to the inside of the human body: paintings depicting the iris, the kernel of vision and epistemology. Her meticulous studies of the eye move between objectivity and mystery in an imaginative spectrum from irises, to temperaments, vibrant flowers and cosmological drama.

 

/ Peter Cornell