Sixth Sense: Hilma af Klint
From the Swan Series, 1915
Hilma Af Klint (1862-1944) was born in Stockholm and studied at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honors in 1887. She soon established herself as a respected painter, exhibiting deftly rendered figurative paintings and serving briefly as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists. During that time, she became deeply involved in Theosophy and spiritualism, modes of spiritual engagement that were widely popular in artistic and literary circles across Europe and the United States. This was due in part to people seeking to reconcile long-held religious beliefs and dogmas that seemed at odds with scientific advances. Af Klint’s first major group of largely non-objective work, The Paintings for the Temple, which eventually grew to 193 works, grew directly out of those belief systems. Produced between 1906 and 1915, the they were generated in part through her practice as a spiritual medium, and they reflect an effort to articulate mystical views of reality. Stylistically, they are strikingly diverse, incorporating both biomorphic and geometric forms, expansive and intimate scales, and maximalist and reductivist approaches to composition and color. She imagined installing the works in a spiral temple, though the plan never came to fruition. In the years after she completed The Paintings for the Temple, af Klint continued to push the bounds of her new abstract vocabulary, as she experimented with form, theme, and seriality, creating some of her most incisive work.
af Klint had a vision that her work would contribute to influence not only the consciousness of people in general, but in its extension also society itself. Convinced the world was not yet ready to understand her work, af Klint rarely exhibited and stipulated in her will that her collection should never be split up, and must not be shown until 20 years following her death. When she died in the autumn of 1944, she left behind around 1300 non-figurative paintings that had never been shown to outsiders, and more than 125 notebooks and sketchbooks. The collection of abstract paintings and notebooks of af Klint is today owned and managed by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.
Above: Group IX/SUW, The Swan Series, 1915
In the winter of 1986, af Klint made her international debut with the exhibition he Spiritual in Art – Abstract Paintings 1890 – 1985, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This travelling exhibition continued to Chicago and to Haag in the Netherlands, and marked the beginning of Hilma af Klint’s international recognition. The works of Hilma af Klint have since been displayed in many exhibitions in the Nordic countries, in Europe and in the United States. In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm held what was then largest retrospective exhibition of the artist, featuring a collection of approximately 230 paintings. After Stockholm, the exhibition continued as a travelling exhibition throughout Europe, and most recently at the Guggenheim New York, which drew more than 600 hundred thousand visitors . It made a significant impact, not the least through the multidisciplinary research it initiated.
– Christina Spearman