The history of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was fascinating and unknown to most. It was a story of a female artist on the edge of the establishment – similar to the subjects of the earlier exhibits Women of the Avant-garde in 2012 and Yoko Ono in 2013 – and thus far, she had not attracted much attention in art history.
Her extensive work was created in a spiritual space of mysticism and other parapsychology movements – similar to what happened with Kandinsky around 1900. Hilma af Klint linked inner experience and symbolism together in innovative and pioneering abstract paintings that were never shown publicly in her lifetime, when she exhibited only her figurative images.
With this exhibition, first shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in the spring of 2013, Hilma af Klint’s artistry attracted much international attention, for example subsequently at the Venice Biennale. It came to Louisiana after showings at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Picasso Museum in Malaga.
FROM URKAOS TO ALTARPIECES
The main focus of the exhibition – marked at each end of the South Wing by a colored, half-rounded wall – was a series of abstract paintings created between 1906 and 1915, which Hilma af Klint collectively referred to as the Paintings for the Temple. They originated from the series Urkaos, which dealt with the emergence of the physical world and was divided into a feminine and a masculine part, with these two fundamental poles creating tension, momentum, and development.
Through the grand, captivating suite on the ages of humanity, The Ten Greatest, visitors proceeded to the series Evolution, The Swan, and The Dove, before reaching the three gigantic Altarpieces at the top of the South Wing. Along the way, it was clear that Hilma af Klint was an artist who continually shifted style and was eager to blend the abstract with the figurative.
Fundamentally, her aim was to describe a gradual movement towards a higher and higher understanding of how the world is interconnected. In fact, Hilma af Klint had envisioned constructing a spiral-shaped temple – she even had plans for it to be on Hven – where it would be possible to gather the Paintings for the Temple and present them as a – also in a physical sense – ascending experience.
THE POWERFUL FORCE OF THE LARGE FORMATS
“I am so small, I am so insignificant, but within me surges such a force that I must move forward.”
Hilma af Klint herself viewed her early abstract works as commissioned pieces – a form of messages channeled through her by her spiritual guides, where she functioned as a medium for higher consciousness forms.
It was precisely in this power and connection to a completely different realm that one found a plausible explanation for why Hilma af Klint worked in formats that were unlike anything else from that time – the series The Ten Greatest were over three meters high. It also explained why she worked exclusively in series.
The individual painting was simply not significant on its own – there was no focus on creating a particular masterpiece, as Hilma had a completely different mission. The series were visualizations of universal principles and were meant to depict the movement from the earthly to an increasingly higher spiritual awareness. A gradual ascent toward a higher, universal truth.
OCCULT AND SOBER
One could not merely view Hilma af Klint as an occult painter, preoccupied with spiritualist séances and contacts with high masters. She was also a skilled naturalist and a keen observer, and her entire body of work testified to her clearly structured and methodical approach to investigating the unknown. All observations were noted and analyzed, and she left behind 25,000 pages of notebooks and sketchbooks, which were only now being examined.
