Hilma af Klint

(Sweden, 26/10/1862 - 21/10/1944)

A long-overlooked pioneer of Abstraction and non-representational art, af Klint’s work profoundly complicates the canonical history of modernism. Born near Stockholm in 1862, af Klint’s father, a hydrographer, introduced her to the precision of scientific study and, for much of her childhood, his huge nautical charts were the only images she consistently encountered, as such, they would go on to have a deep influence on her art.

Af Klint began her formal training in 1882 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts where she trained in drawing, portraiture, landscape and botanical painting and graduated with honours in 1887. While studying, she met Anna Cassel with whom she formed the spiritualist group The Five, and began experimenting with automatic drawing in 1896. Prefiguring later Surrealist experiments in automatism, these sessions became an essential laboratory for af Klint’s new geometric visual language that was capable of conceptualising invisible forces of both the inner and outer worlds.

Also in 1896, af Klint began exhibiting her conventional portrait and landscape paintings in group exhibitions in Stockholm, building a strong reputation within conventional artistic circles with her work reflecting the academic realism favoured by late nineteenth-century Scandinavian art. Aware of her gendered place in art and society, af Klint kept her non-representational work private and maintained staunch separation between the two.

Between 1906 and 1915 af Klint embarked on the extraordinary series Paintings for the Temple, comprising nearly two hundred works. She described this project as being executed under spiritual guidance, a commission from higher forces to produce images that would reveal the unity of all existence. Within the series, subgroups such as The Ten Largest (1907) explore human life’s stages through vast canvases exceeding three meters in height and compositions that employ spirals, ovoids and vibrant chromatic harmonies to express spiritual and biological evolution.

Af Klint’s abstraction, however, emerged from a distinct intellectual matrix. Rather than seeking to dissolve representation in pure form, she conceived of abstraction as a symbolic language capable of articulating unseen dimensions of spiritual, scientific and cosmic reality. Her diagrams combine organic and geometric structures, letters and colour codes to visualise correspondences between matter and spirit, with her notebooks, numbering more than 26,000 pages, revealing a systematic and self-reflective process that integrates mystical cosmology with rigorous formal experimentation.

Although she continued to produce representational works to earn her living, af Klint considered her abstract paintings part of a sacred mission not yet intelligible to her contemporaries. As such, she stipulated in her will that these works not be exhibited until at least twenty years after her death, believing that future generations would be better equipped to understand them.

When af Klint died in 1944, her oeuvre, consisting of more than 1,300 paintings, remained virtually unknown outside a small circle of acquaintances. In doing so, she catapulted her life’s work into the future, out of the first half of the twentieth century into the second where it could be safe from the judgement of her contemporaries.

In accordance with her wishes, her paintings remained hidden until 1970 when they were offered to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet who declined the acquisition and the first posthumous exhibition of her abstract works was later held in Helsinki in 1984. While these prompted some renewed scholarly interest, it was a 2018 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that secured her position in the international canon. The exhibition attracted the largest audience in the Museum’s history and redefined narratives of early abstraction, compelling historians to reconsider the gendered exclusions and teleological assumptions that had long shaped accounts of modern art’s origins.

Today, af Klint stands as a foundational figure in the history of abstraction, whose synthesis of mysticism, science, modernity and the unseen dimensions of artistic thought continues to resonate with contemporary discourses on art history.

Image: Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 17, Group IX/SUW, Series SUW/UW (1915). Oil and tempera on canvas, 150.5 x 151 cm. Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk, HaK 165. The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.