18.09.2024 – 26.01.2025

EMMA is proud to present a retrospective featuring the intricate, lyrical paintings of the Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942). The exhibition named Passage looks back at Wiggen’s iconic paintings along her long-lasting career of more than 60 years. Wiggen’s works showcase the wide spectrum of her oeuvre and reflect her enduring interest, such as studying human and technical devices.

The retrospective marks the most extensive showing of Wiggen’s oeuvre ever seen in Finland. When Wiggen began her career in the 1960s, her paintings revolved around the theme of breakthroughs in technology. She achieved renown for her highly detailed illustrations of the insides of electronic devices, such as circuit boards and computer components. In the 1970s, Wiggen switched to portraiture and pursued training as a psychotherapist, a profession she practiced until the beginning of the 2020s. During these 30 years she continued painting sporadically. In the 2010s, she returned to painting. Shifting from portraits, she began depicting the human body and its internal organs, particularly brains and the iris of the eye. Since the 2020s, she has exclusively focused on painting irises and pupils.

Ulla Wiggen’s artistic breakthrough dates back to her student days in the 1960s. Since her international breakthrough in the 2010s, she has exhibited at numerous major venues including the 59th Venice Biennale, and her paintings have been acquired for many prestigious art collections.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany and Västerås Konstmuseum in Sweden. The Fridericianum hosted Ulla Wiggen’s exhibition Outside / Inside in spring 2024, and in 2025 the exhibition hosted at EMMA will travel to its next destination, Västerås.