When it comes to describing the work of artist Sig Waller, I think the writer Seb Doubinsky sums it up best:

If you don’t know Sig Waller’s art, you don’t know shit. It’s amazing.

Writers are good like that. Good with words.

Over the past twenty years, Sig Waller has produced a staggering array of exceedingly beautiful, powerful, subversive, often disturbing yet darkly comic paintings, drawings and prints. Her work explores the darker borders of our culture of excess—with particular attention to our potential for destruction.

Her most recent work Goodbye to Love was a hit exhibition at 35blumen, Krefeld, Germany in 2016. Taking its title from that well-known bittersweet song by the Carpenters, Goodbye to Love focused on the reality between being a woman and a mother when compared to the idealized fantasy as promoted in the pages of women’s magazines, TV and billboard advertising and old 1950s housewives’ guides. Sig’s “housewives” are drooling Pavlovian figures, expected to perform absurd tasks and domestic rituals. The work is a stylistic follow-on from her 2013 show Happy Homes. But the black humor very apparent in Happy Homes has now been replaced in Goodbye to Love by a far more subversive and unsettling vision of supposed domestic bliss.

Born in Wales, the daughter of an American historian father (“who dressed like a tramp”) and a German psychologist mother, Sig studied Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths College, London, before going on to work in animation, music videos and design. In 1995, Sig moved to Berlin where she started exhibiting under the name S.I.G.

Since then Sig has successfully exhibited across the world in America, England, Germany, Austria, Italy (where she had a residency) and in her home country of Wales. 

I’ve banged my drum about Sig before and will continue to be her cheerleader as I believe Sig Waller belongs to that small body of contemporary artists who have something important to say. Sig’s next exhibition Running with the Wolves will open on May 26th at 35Blumen, Krefeld. Below is a selection of Sig’s paintings (oil on digiprint) from Goodbye to Love from 2016.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Beautiful Fevered Dreams: The Art of Sig Waller
Sig Waller: ‘Our capacity for cruelty and suffering is timeless, as is our ability to look away’
Adult ‘Parlour Games’: Exclusive new drawings by Sig Waller (NSFW)
‘Shadow Play’ and ‘Happy Homes’: Powerful new work by artist Sig Waller