Irmgard Sigg (born Margarete Irmgard Knorsch) grew up under the Nazi regime and later amid the ruins of the Second World War. After studying music and ballet from 1940 until 1955 in Germany, when she left Germany to settle permanently in Paris. She obtained French nationality in 1957. From 1956 to 1958 she studied violin at the Conservatoire de Paris and was a dancer at the Folies Bergère, but she soon changed direction: in 1961 she began attending evening classes in drawing and sculpting held by the City of Paris, before beginning studies at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1962. During her six years there she practised her craft in the marble-carving sculpture studio run by René Collamarini (1904–1983). From then on, sculpture became the artist’s preferred medium.
From 1967 until the 1980s, I. Sigg was a frequent participant in the Salon de la jeune sculpture, the Salon de mai, the Salon d’automne, the Salon des réalités nouvelles and the Grands et jeunes d’aujourd’hui. From 1981, she was represented by Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris, which held regular exhibitions of her work as well as publishing catalogues, until the gallery’s closure in 2010.

In the 1970s the sculptor began gaining recognition for her large-scale public artworks for newly constructed cities, such as Bobigny (Lieu du pouvoir, 1977; Arc de mémoire, monument à la Résistance, 1990), Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (Château de non-lieu, 1981, now destroyed), Champigny-sur-Marne (Île d’Isis, 1986) and Vitry-sur-Seine (L’Oracle de Delphes, 1988). In the words of philosopher Yves Michaud, “Irmgard Sigg’s sculptures summon a feeling of unease – but not all art is made to reassure or console”. Her works from 1968 to 1972 are, according to Georges Raillard, imbued with a “violent crumpled expressiveness”, inhabiting a disturbing universe filled with mutant-looking creatures (Jardin carnivore, 1972). Later the artistwould create what she often referred to as “passages”: her bridges, footbridges, labyrinths and tortuous staircases (Lieu d’incertitude, 1976), architectural forms in bronze, resin or wood and stretched rope, follow in the tradion of  Piranesian follies and paper architectures inspired by Russian Constructivism. In the 1980s the volcanic crater became a recurring motif, along with the creation of characters that evoke warriors or farmers (Le Gaucher, 1984), which, though they appear threatening, also testify to the artist’s delight in the interplay of lines, curves and the reduction of forms.

In the 1990s, I. Sigg continued to experiment with technique, producing figures in plaster, fabric and acrylic. Her “lutins” (elves) are hybrid, part human, part animal beings, often presented in pairs, in positions of struggle or contortion, and usually accompanied a bestiary of exotic animals seen in the deliberately naive paintings to which the artist would devote herself from 2005 onwards.
Works by I. Sigg can be found in the collections of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap), the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL), the Villeurbanne Institut d’Art Contemporain, the Frac Réunion and the contemporary art collection of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis.