As an old man, Hokusai famously stated that nothing he made before the age of 65 was worth noting. According to his own somewhat coy account, it was only well into his seventh decade that he learnt to understand his surroundings. If you put the tragicomically modest statement to the side and read between the lines, Hokusai’s words constitute a refreshing and surprisingly relevant argument against the contemporary cult of youth, and against the art world’s constant pursuit ofthe next hot young artist. Logically, there should be a positive correlation between life experience and artistic expression.
But then there are exceptions that completely pull the rug out from under Hokusai’s thesis. The Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen is one such anomaly. Her retrospective exhibition Passage at Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA) presents an artist who from the very beginning of her career in the early 1960s created incredibly sophisticated and fascinating paintings. Wiggen was in her twenties at the time, but painted with such confidence that the viewer to this day can only marvel. And yet, she has also succeeded in what Hokusai calls for: to never let the process of development stop.
Passage arrives in Espoo straight from Kassel, where it was shown earlier this year at the Fridericianum with the title Outside / Inside. In 2025, it will travel to Västerås Art Museum in Sweden. There’s a gap of sixty years between the oldest and the newest paintings. This long period can easily be divided into different phases, the earliest of which focuses entirely on electronics whereas the latest trains on the iris of the human eye. While both suites are iconic, the older one is positively groundbreaking. Wiggen’s reverentially executed depictions of electronic components are minimal and serious. Her unfailingly sure hand and careful aesthetic expression save them from being dry or complacent.
The fact that the electronic works from the 1960s seem so sharp has to do with Wiggen’s ability to abstract. The titles are guiding rather than explanatory, which for me as a layperson upholds a vague and welcome air of mystery. It’s pleasurable not knowing for sure what the apparatus I am looking at can do and how it works. In a world reeling from attempts to provide eight billion people with 24-hour access to electricity, Wiggen’s technological paintings still feel relevant. Visually, they also feel fresh, probably because Wiggen didn’t make her subjects up, but painstakingly painted real electronics. Since there is no science fiction or fuzzy futuristic imaginings involved, the atmosphere in the works doesn’t feel particularly outdated.
However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t room for wild speculation: the stripped-down The Red TV (1967) could be something that flickers by in an android tale in the style of the anime classic Ghost in the Shell (1995), while Simultaneous Interpretation (1965) could be a map of a virtual world. Sometimes there are glimpses of something organic, as in Circuit Family (1964) and Pulse Generator (1967), in which shapes resembling bacterial cells break up the angular and precise.
Wiggen’s electronic period ended in the late 1960s, partly because of her reluctance to be defined as a girl who only paints electronics. After a few years of tentative commitment to painting relatively traditional portraits, she switched careers and became a psychotherapist, disappearing from the public eye for almost forty years. When she actively resumed painting in the 2010s, she was still as virtuosic as she had been half a century before – almost excruciatingly precise in her brushstrokes and fiercely focused on one phenomenon at a time.
Interestingly, Wiggen has been in the contemporary spotlight during both of her active periods. In the 1960s, she was part of the neo-avant-garde circles around Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and in recent years she has exhibited at leading galleries, been highlighted in Artforum, and participated in the Venice Biennale 2022.
The transitional periods on both sides of Wiggen’s long career as a therapist consist of portrait paintings. These are the exhibition’s weakest works. In the context of the retrospective, the portraits are certainly justified, but their artistic value is low compared to the suites in which Wiggen adopts more creative perspectives. Her somewhat stiff and sensible style doesn’t work at all when she paints people. Two older portraits of the Swedish art critic Peter Cornell, The Horizon (1969) and In Front of You (1972), may convey a sense of trust and affection between model and artist, but visually they are stuck in their time. More recent works such as Medusa (2012) and Young Man (2012), on the other hand, feel uncomfortably impersonal.
The magic happens when Wiggen dives into herself and monomaniacally focuses on motifs that have been cut out of their everyday context and surroundings. In the last decade, she has mainly painted spherical irises and strange dreamscapes made up of human organs. The kinship with the works from the 1960s is undeniable, and the leap in time feels both insignificant and monumental. The difference between the two eras is mainly visible in the way in which Wiggen now allows herself to approach the grotesque. Her technical execution, on the other hand, has always been of such a high standard that there is no friction or conflict between the electronics works and the new stuff.
What makes Wiggen’s paintings so captivating is that, despite being figurative, they often feel difficult to describe or summarise in any meaningful way. The subtle way in which she creates her subjects also contributes to this. In reproduction, her works often lose their lustre. On the internet, the iris paintings appear uninspired and banal, but at EMMA they are a pleasure to look at. Their mesmerising detail, vibrant colour transitions, and deep black pupils only come across in real life. Particularly appealing is Iris XVIII Line (2020), which hangs alone on a wall. The aggressively chalk-white background makes it easy to switch between imagining a whole eye and looking at the iris on its own, completely isolated from everything else.
Thanks to their unusual rounded shape and impressive simplicity, Wiggen’s irises in particular have attracted more attention than the fictional anatomies that precede them in time. Yet I am more in awe of the bizarre visions of brains that Wiggen painted during the mid-2010s. The highlight of the exhibition is the title work, Passage (2016), which for some strange reason has been curtly installed on a bleak concrete wall at the far end from the entrance. The acrylic painting depicts the two hemispheres of the brain as if they were two orbiting stars about to merge. The background is partly made up of a mycelium of optic nerves. The work is a riddle without an answer, a cosmic representation of perception and human consciousness. Nearby, The Face of the Soul (2016) offers more down-to-earth references, depicting surreal details that feel distinctly insect-like inside the contours of a brain not exactly reptilian, but something like it.
The retrospective’s previous title, Outside / Inside, is a rather clumsy description of Wiggen’s artistic themes. What makes her special, however, is precisely the integrity and sense of ease with which she moves between different motifs and sediments of humanity and machines. Her ability to zoom in and worm her way beneath the surface of the ordinary feels entirely unique. The mood of Passage is introspective without being sullen. When I look at Wiggen’s work, I feel strangely seen without understanding how or by whom. It’s a feeling I will never forget.
