Born in Møgeltønder in Southern Jutland, from 1946, Svend Wiig Hansen (1922–1997) attended the sculpture school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He studied under artists Johannes Bjerg and Einar Utzon-Frank, making his debut at the annual Artists’ Autumn Exhibition (Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling) in 1946.
Wiig Hansen stands apart from many of his contemporaries in the Danish modernist avant-garde, he did not belong to any of the artists associations and groups like CoBrA, Linien or Spiralen. He was a member of Den Frie Udstilling however, exhibiting works. . Like many artists, his earliest works were representational, more realistic sculptures of the human body. However, unlike many artists at the time, Wiig Hansen did not abandon the body for abstraction.The body and its life cycle continued to be the primary theme of his work.
He was particularly interested in the corruption and mutation of the body, creating sculptures and paintings meditating on this theme. For instance, his 1958 sculpture Den Næseløse, showing a bulbous face turning in on itself, was created after Wiig Hansen met a woman suffering from Lupus while in Greece, who had lost her nose due to complications from the disease. Wiig Hansen was a pacifist and deeply anti-authoritarian. His depictions of the body in crisis are often understood as reflecting and metabolising the inhumane shocks to the body reverberating in the aftermath of the Second World War, as well as reflecting the violence of the contemporary Cold War and Vietnam War.
Wiig Hansen’s early start as a sculptor influences all his later work, which branched into painting, graphics ceramics, glasswork, film, music and performance. He often combined these media, as in his performance piece Konfrontasjon, or Confrontation, at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 1981. Here, in front of an audience, accompanied by an improvisational jazz trio, Wiig Hansen painted on a 12m long canvas, spontaneously creating in dialogue with Edvard Munch’s own monumental works.
The artist contributed many public sculptures and decorations, including the decoration of the interior of Kastrup Church in Amager, completed between 1973–1978. Most famously, his sculpture Moder Jord or Mother Earth, 1953. This work, representing a naked woman spreading her legs as if to give birth, was initially installed in front of the City Hall in Aarhus, where it was met with outrage, catapulting Wiig Hansen to national attention. The sculpture was banished to Wiig Hansen’s garden, before it was re-installed in Herning where again, the public decried it, and it was covered up with cloth. Finally it found an audience at the 1964 Venice Biennale, in which Wiig Hansen represented Denmark.
Wiig Hansen was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ sculpture school from 1971to 1976. He was at other times, an art teacher at Horsens State Prison, and accepted as a singer of the Royal Danish Opera Chorus.
His work can be found in the collections of ARoS, Louisiana, Museum Sønderjylland, Statens Museum for Kunst, Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was the subject of a major exhibition in 1990 at Statens Museum for Kunst, and more recently a retrospective at ARoS in 2026.