NAU NUA: ULLA WIGGEN

A fastidious output

Ulla Wiggen, 2013
Photo: Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet

The moment at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm has arrived to the Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen. The current exhibition titled Moment is a selection of her work around the machine theme, pop, minimalism, new objectivism and photo-realism, always with an idiosyncratic attitude that gives her work an untemporary air. The paintings are mainly from the sixties and early seventies with titles like Remote Control Unit, Magnetic Memory, and Electronic Resistance, names that may seem a portrait of the current times.

Ulla Wiggen was born in Stockholm in 1942. During 1964-1969, she made only some 30 paintings, most of which represent the interior of various electronic devices. In fact, she started her studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 1967 and her first exhibition was in 1968 at the Galleri Prisma and took part in Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts at the ICA in London the same year. At the same time, Ulla Wiggen was involved in Fylkingen, an association for new music and intermedia. Different ways to experiment with the new technologies in order to be more connected with the new era, something deeply present right now in the daily life. But she, even then, got deeply into the machines world. She seems to look for understanding the relation between human beings and machines but never using the technology observed. Her work is a mere observation of it but one has always the feeling of a kind of making the machines interior become warmer, closer to our human needs. In the end, they can be seen as beautiful hangings or even marvelous abstract paintings which makes the work of Ulla Wiggen something equally close to tradition and avant-garde.

Ulla Wiggen | Moment. Exhibition here

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Ulle Wiggen website www.ullawiggen.com

Photo 1 by Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet
Image 2 still from the Om Ulla Wiggen video by Moderna Museet