There are quite a few painters who tried through their works to reach out to a spiritual dimension or to capture a vision of the future. Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is definitely among them.
Though she anticipated the abstractist style of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Piet Mondrian (1872-1972), Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) and František Kupka (1871-1957), Hilma af Klint remained pretty unknown to the wider public like many other women artists, but an exhibition opening next week at Stockholm's Moderna Museet (and touring internationally in 2013-2015) will be rediscovering and celebrating her.
Born in 1862, Hilma af Klint rejected figurative painting as early as 1906 producing nearly 200 abstract artworks, some in monumental formats. In her paintings she was influenced by contemporary spiritual movements, including spiritualism, theosophy and, later, anthroposophy.
She produced her first 111 paintings between November 1906 and April 1908, and she created her central body of work, The Paintings for the Temple (comprising 193 paintings), between 1906 and 1915.
Hilma af Klint believed that a higher consciousness was speaking through her and guiding her hand while she painted.
"The pictures were painted directly through me," she wrote, "without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke."
Her highly spiritual works that attempt to analyse other dimensions of existence are also characterised by elementary geometric figures – squares, cubes, circles, triangles and pyramids - in bright eye-catching colours. Her paintings of pyramids often seem to hint at occult meanings and contain hidden fields of radiance stemming from the corners of the figure.
Though she left more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper, Hilma af Klint refused to show her abstract paintings during her lifetime and requested not to display any work in public until 20 years after her death.
Moderna Museet’s retrospective exhibition will feature 230 works between paintings and works on paper by Hilma af Klint, from The Paintings for the Temple to works created before and after this series, some of them shown for the very first time. Curator Iris Müller-Westermann, who also researched Hilma af Klint's diaries and notebooks while preparing this exhibition, stated: "Hilma af Klint left behind a comprehensive and visually striking oeuvre. Her works, produced in seclusion, are as powerful as they are enigmatic. Their complexity, scale, and consequence are astonishing. The artist unwaveringly explored new horizons at the outset of the 20th century, a radical pioneer of an art that abandoned the depiction of the visible reality. Hilma af Klint was one of the few female artists of her generation who fully pursued what she believed in. She was convinced of the importance of her artistic output and devoted all of her energies to her tasks."
Some critics said that words in her works conveyed occult messages and Hilma af Klint was convinced that only after her death the world would have been ready to understand the significance of her art.
We may not be able to grasp the entire meaning behind her works or decode the hidden messages in her geometric shapes and abstract motifs, yet the most interesting aspect about this exhibition at Stockholm's Moderna Museet does not stand in the answers that Hilma af Klint's paintings can provide us with, but in the questions they ask us and in their fascinating relationship with art, geometry, nature and spiritualism.
Hilma af Klint - A Pioneer of Abstraction, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 16 February - 26 May, 2013. Further tour dates: Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany, 15 June - 6 October 2013; Museo Picasso Málaga, Sparin, 21 October 2013 - 9 February 2014.
Image credits:
Portrait of Hilma af Klint © Photographer unknown.
Artworks by Hilma af Klint:
The Swan, No. 17, Group IX/SUW, The SUW/UW Series, 1914-1915
© Courtesy Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
Altarpiece, No. 1, Group X, Altarpiece Series, 1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth, Group IV, 1907
© Courtesy Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
Seven-Pointed Star, No. 2, Group V, The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, 1908
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
Evolution, No. 7, Group VI, The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, 1908
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
Primordial Chaos, No. 16, Group I, The WU/Rose Series, 1906-1907
© Courtesy Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
All images courtesy Moderna Museet, Stockholm
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