Kanalväljare

The truly ‘iconic’ (an all-too-often used description that, for once, is completely accurate) Kanalväljare occupies an absolute, and undeniable, central place in Ulla Wiggen’s production. The painting was first displayed at Wiggen’s, breakthrough, debut exhibition at Galerie Prisma, Stockholm in 1968. That same year, it was also part of the exhibition Samma sak at the Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki; one of her very first international exhibitions (the other two being the 1968 exhibitions Cybernetic Serendipity. The Computer and the Arts at ICA, London and Public Eye at Kunsthaus, Hamburg, West Germany). 

Kanalväljare was, in addition to this, also a vital contribution to Wiggen’s, celebrated, 2013 solo exhibition Ulla Wiggen - Momentat Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In conjunction with the exhibition, Moderna Museet chose Kanalväljare as the main image for, ‘Machines & mechanical’, their online presentation of the exhibition. Since then, Kanalväljare has been exhibited internationally, on numerous occasions, in locations ranging from New York (Galerie Buchholz, 2019) in the west to Melbourne (MUMA, Monash University Museum of Art, 2015) in the east. The painting was also singled out as the cover illustration for the recent book Ulla Wiggen (2022).

Numerous of the, overwhelmingly positive, reviews of Wiggen’s latest (2025) exhibition (Passage) at Västerås konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden were also illustrated by images of Kanalväljare. Of, probably, even greater importance however is the fact that Kanalväljare grazed the cover of the incredibly prestigious magazine Artforum (Volume 58, Issue 03, November 2019) when Wiggen participated in the 2019 group exhibition Vista View at Galerie Buchholz, New York. Wiggen was (positively) shocked by the cover and ‘was “not herself” for two weeks.’ Inside the magazine, art historian and philosopher, Ina Blom (Wigeland Visiting Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Chicago) stated that Wiggen’s paintings open up a narrative on ‘girls and technology’ referring to:

[…] the long history of women as members of the workforce in the electronic industries, for instance, their labor in this capacity recalling the disciplined, quiet meticulousness associated with women’s crafts — the countless generations of nimble hands and keen eyes engaged in the most intricate needlework or weaving — represented today by images of female workers in factories in China or Vietnam assembling tiny mobile-phone components on gruelling twelve-hour shifts.

Blom goes on to write that Wiggen’s technical abstractions bypass the ‘human sensorium’ to convey an engagement with the ‘unknowable’ aspects of electronic technology, revealing its ‘deepest secrets.’

The painting was executed in 1967, a period during which the scientifically inclined and ever-curious Ulla Wiggen became interested in machines and electronics. Wiggen’s ex-husband, Peter Cornell (1942 - 2025, former professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; author; art critic etc.) described (‘Ulla Wiggen’s Gaze – A Poetics of Objectivity. A Biographical Sketch’, article in Ulla Wiggen, 2022) the circumstances surrounding the creation of these remarkable, and groundbreaking, paintings:

At that time she was busy working on a series of paintings depicting electronic equipment, circuit boards and computer components. I was struck by her objective and precise gaze; by her sharp eye. The series had begun with small, detailed gouaches executed between 1963 and 1964, and then a few years later with larger scale paintings in acrylic on panels. That was when we became close and day by day I watched as these acrylic paintings materialised in her studio. Her working process seemed assured. She would often use as source materials photographs from specialised computer journals, treating the images freely by choosing some parts and combining them into new systems whilst retaining the objective precision of the photograph. Poetic machines came into being, both precise and imaginary.

The early 1960s was a time when humanity placed great, or even unlimited, faith in the new technologies that would improve life on this planet. Electronics and computer technology (still in its infancy) in particular, seemed to point the way towards new, previously unimaginable, goals. The, then, President of the United States, John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963) famously embraced and expressed this zeitgeist in his adress (on the Nation’s Space Effort) at Rice University, Houston, Texas on the 12th of September 1962: ‘We choose to go to the Moon’, declaring his (and the nation’s) intention to land a man on the Moon, before the end of the decade, and bring him safely back to Earth (something which actually happened in 1969). 

Dreams about the possibilities of electronics and computers soon spread to the arts. This desire for a dialogue between technology and art was fulfilled, in Sweden, by the avant-garde organisation Fylkingen (artist-run venue and member based organisation committed to contemporary experimental performing arts) and the Swedish Public Radio’s electronic music studio EMS, both of which were fronted by musician and composer Knut Wiggen (1927 - 2016, Ulla Wiggen’s husband 1962 - 1967).

Wiggen would join her husband sometimes when he visited KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Some years later Wiggen remembered (quoted in Barbro Schultz Lundestam & Gunnar Lundestam, Party for Öyvind, 2021) these pivotal visits:

To me, these amplifiers, relays, transistors and flow charts were a mysterious inaccessible world. Contact was made through my then husband, composer Knut Wiggen. Knut knew Stig Carlsson, who designed the Carlsson speakers. Sometimes we visited him at KTH and then I used to stroll around on my own. I was inspired and began to paint what I had seen. Machines and how things fit together have always interested me. […] I also met a lot of engineers who came to meetings in our home and were delighted that I painted something from their world. They provided me with as much material as I could wish for and I put them together into something that does not exist or work at all. Older things combined with new things, which for an expert would make no sense. But I just went for the visuals. I’ve always done that, what is visually interesting to me.

This was the time, between 1963 and 1964, when Förutsättningar (30 x 53 cm), Kretsfamilj (35 x 30 cm) and Förstärkare (35 x 25 cm) were created, painted with infinite care, in thick, tactile gouache paints,; using ultra fine paintbrushes on panels covered in gauze. It is worth pointing out that Wiggen, at this point, was more or less self-taught and therefore, as Cornell writes, ‘free from the conventions of art schools when it came to techniques, genres, the role of the artist and a traditional lyrical painterly expression.’ Wiggen describes (in Party for Öyvind, 2021) her first ‘electronic painting’ as:

very simple and sketchy. Then I made two more in the same technique, in gouache. Knut and I lived in a small single-room apartment, so it was impossible to sit and paint in oil paint there. I wanted to apply thick paint, not water colour, so gouache was simply the choice. If you look at the paintings you see that they have gauze stretched over a panel. I did this simply so that the paint would have something that it could attach to. The format was determined by the largest size of unfolded gauze compresses I could find at the pharmacy.

A few years later Wiggen replaced the gouache with more synthetic materials such as uniformly and smoothly applied acrylic paint with tape dividing the sections, as well as working in significantly larger formats. This move was linked to a couple of, for Wiggen, important and inspiring visits to New York, in 1965 and 1966. In New York she was given the opportunity to work as Öyvind Fahlström’s (1928 – 1976, legendary and productive Swedish multimedia artist, author and poet, working in many genres, often dealing with political and social issues) assistant:

when Öyvind asked me if I wanted to help him […] I immediately said yes and went over to New York and it changed my life. I was well taken care of by Öyvind and his wife Barbro Östlihn and met a lot of their friends, who were well known POP artists - Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and many more. I came to their studios and sat talking to them and they often came home to Barbro and Öyvind.

Together with Östlihn (1930 - 1995, celebrated Swedish artist), Wiggen executed sections of Fahlström’s paintings according to his instructions. As a by-product of this work, and also inspired by Östlihn, Wiggen found ideas for new working methods in her own production (in works like Kanalväljare, executed the year after her return from New York):

The spirit of the time was vital, technology and art would be brought together and nothing was impossible. It affected me in many ways. […] It was fantastic to see Barbro Östlihn making her grand paintings […] I couldn’t keep doing these small paintings. It was too slow and too small. Everyone made large paintings. I learned that you can use tape, you don’t have to sit and paint [by hand] to get it straight and then it’s much faster. You can use photographs, you can use a projector, you can use a lot. Anything that allows you to produce what you want, you should use. I learned an awful lot of techniques. The acrylic paint too. Öyvind used it. I painted with gouache before, in my little single-room flat. There I couldn’t use oil paint, because it smells awful and is not good for your health. But the acrylic paint is very good to work with.

It may be appropriate here to recall the famous words (by art critic Magnus Bons, in connection with Wiggen’s acclaimed solo exhibition, Moment, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2013) stating that Wiggen (and her art) could be ‘the missing link between Barbro Östlihn and Öyvind Fahlström’.

Back in Sweden Wiggen enrolled at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm in 1968, but as she had already established, and developed, her subject and visual language she only visited the school sporadically: ‘After the inspiring New York era, things got easier. I entered the Royal Academy of Arts, as a student of Carl-Fredrik Reuterswärd. However, I was not often at school. I preferred to sit at home in my own studio. But I used to attend Ulf Linde’s lectures.’ Rather than the Royal Institute, Wiggen’s painterly style, instead, took her to London that same year, where she was invited to participate in Cybernetic Serendipity. The Computer and the Arts - a pioneering and now legendary exhibition about the connections between art, computers and digital technology at ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts). Wiggen also exhibited in Public Eye at Kunsthaus, Hamburg, West Germany. 1968 was also the year that Moderna Museet, Stockholm acquired (at her break-through debut exhibition at Galleri Prisma, Stockholm) her painting TRASK (1967, acrylic on panel, 150 x 80 cm), a ‘portrait’ of the titular computer, built by a group of Swedish engineers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (TRASK was an evolution of Sweden’s first computer, BESK, which for a few months had been the fastest in the world).

By now Wiggen’s paintings had become larger and more distinct. With newly learned techniques and materials she also executed them a lot faster, progressing from before the trips abroad when she only completed two paintings in one year. Wiggen was one of the first to claim the new electronic technology as a subject for painting, and she, in the words of Cornell: ‘had a purely intuitive feeling that these objects represented a digital revolution to come, and this at a time when not even IBM thought personal computers had a future.’ The fact that Wiggen, better than most, had a sense of what the future held in store makes her work seem more contemporary than ever. This is confirmed by Sabeth Buchmann (Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) who writes (‘Inside the [Painting] Machine’, article in Ulla Wiggen, 2022):

It is no surprise to me that Wiggen’s painting is currently receiving renewed attention, at a time when the co-constitution of the aesthetic and the technical is finding new significance in post-human and post-media discourses. It is as if Wiggen always understood her paintings to be interpretations of the techno-aesthetic organization of human sight; as Wiggen paints it, its mode of operation appears (un)ambiguously ambiguous.

Wiggen pulled off the feat of turning these, seemingly matter-of-fact, circuit boards and relays into great works of art, in a series of ‘electronic paintings’ characterised by ambiguity. Although Wiggen dispensed with subjective painterly effects in these works (replacing impasto oil paint with dry acrylic and abandoning freehand drawing in favour of lines made with tape), she also steered clear of strictly anonymous minimalism or structuralism. Olle Granath (born 1940, Swedish art critic and museum director; previously director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm [1980 - 1989] and Nationalmuseum, Stockholm [1989 - 2001]) pointed this out in his review of Wiggen’s exhibition at Galerie Prisma back in 1968: ‘Yet one clearly senses how, within this voluntarily chosen limitation, the subjective acts as -just- tenderness. One should be cautious about (as has happened) casting her as a representative of what has been called a contemporary ‘cool’ sensibility. The very sensual attention to detail contradicts such claims in these pictures.’

The final words on Wiggen’s ‘electronic paintings’, among which Kanalväljare occupies a special place, are, however, reserved for one of the leading experts on Wiggen’s art, Peter Cornell, who wrote the following (in Peter Cornell & Frans Josef Petersson, Om Ulla Wiggen, 2013):

Her paintings of electronic components are a kind of still lifes: in the still life tradition, the artist paints a collection of objects on a table, often depicting trivial everyday objects. Yet the objects may reveal to our gaze something more than their immediate visibility, their visibility reflecting to us something invisible, perhaps a religious meaning like the book, the bread and the wine decanter in old master paintings. Or a heightened and contemplative sensibility for the existence, as in Cotán, Chardin, Cézanne or Morandi. Rilke writes of Cézanne’s objects: ‘he makes saints of such things; and forces them - forces them - to be beautiful, to stand for the joy and glory of the world.’ Or Chirico’s remark about Morandi, that he reveals ‘the metaphysical aspect inherent in the most mundane objects.’

Provenance

Galerie Prisma, Stockholm, 1968.

Private collection (acquired from the above), 1968 - 2025.

Belenius, Stockholm, 2025.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired through the above).

Exhibitions

Galerie Prisma, Stockholm (Wiggen’s first solo exhibition), 1968.

Amos Andersonin taidemuseo (Amos Anderson Art Museum), Helsinki, Samma sak, 1968.

Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Ulla Wiggen - Moment, 13 April - 25 August 2013.

MUMA, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia, Technologism, 3 October - 12 December 2015.

Galerie Buchholz, New York, U.S.A., Vista View, 31 January - 20 April 2019.

Centre Pompidou, Paris, Réseaux-mondes / Worlds of Networks, 23 February - 25 April 2022.

Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Visionary Machineries, 8 July - 26 August 2023.

Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, Outside / Inside, 24 February - 28 July 2024.

EMMA, Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland, Ulla Wiggen - Passage, 18 September 2024 - 26 January 2025.

Västerås konstmuseum (Västerås Art Museum), Västerås, Sweden, Ulla Wiggen - Passage, 15 March - 31 August 2025.

Literature

Peter Cornell, ‘Ulla Wiggen’, Konstrevy, no. 1, 1968.

Dagens Nyheter, 19 January, 1968.

När var hur, 1969.

Dagens Nyheter, 2 May, 2013.

Artforum, Volume 58, Issue 03, November 2019, illustrated in colour on the front cover.

Daniel Birnbaum, Peter Cornell, Sabeth Buchmann and Caleb Considine, Ulla Wiggen, 2022, mentioned p. 40 and illustrated full page in colour, p. 22 as well as in colour on the front cover.