Oscar Wiggli. «Body - Space - Sound» A creative output overview

Wiggli's singular and abstract metal sculptures are transformations of female body shapes and natural processes. In his almost sixty years of creativity, the artist has produced a sculptural oeuvre of enormous technical and formal scope comprising subtle sheet-metal constructions as well as monolithic and monumental sculpture. In Wiggli's case, drawing, print and photography are autonomous artistic forms of expression that make analogous content visible. Through his work in various genres and via the medium of music, Wiggli discovers synthesizing solutions. In his electro-acoustic compositions, Wiggli collects and manipulates sound to make volumes of resonance that find great appreciation among the avant-garde.

On the occasion of Oscar Wiggli's 80th birthday, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and the Paul Klee Centre are presenting a comprehensive overview of all the creative directions taken by the artist. The Museum of Fine Arts is placing its main emphasis on work from the last twenty years. During this period, the artist was able to unify his sculptural and graphic work under the auspices of his musical composition into a synthesis of art and also to visualize the sound imagery of his music in rhythmic compositions.  Musical characteristics are also typical of Wiggli's early work. In the 1980s, vibrant metal sculpture and photographs of dynamic landscapes are witness to the interaction of sculpture, photography and music. In the decades before this, wavy, vibrating bodies, dancing figures of sheet metal and drawings of tall slender forms are what bear witness to Oscar Wiggli's fundamental musical feeling.

The exhibition of Oscar Wiggli's work is the first joint exhibition by the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and the Paul Klee Centre within the framework of a closer future collaboration as planned in the autumn of 2006.  While the Museum of Fine Arts will be showing Wiggli's sculptures in smaller and medium formats, in the Martha Müller Sculpture Park and the Museumstrasse, the Paul Klee Centre will be showing large-format steel sculptures which the artist created between 1987 and 1994 in the Von Roll Works in Gerlafingen with the aid of industrial presses and hydraulic sledgehammers.