![]() How we view these paintings is a challenge to existing narratives about how art gets produced. That is to say, her vast oeuvre, made in the name of the occult and never exhibited, has finally entered the world. ![]() Catherine de Zegher, the curator of the Drawing Center exhibition, insisted on the generative role of a spiritual Utopianism for women artists, who were otherwise constrained by social as well as artistic conventions, whilst at the same time complicating all the old myths about the spiritual in art that the earlier exhibition had celebrated.īut it wasn’t until the much more thorough retrospective curated by Iris Müller-Westermann at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm earlier this year that we had the opportunity to fully examine what the work Af Klint made so prolifically as a spiritualist means as a body of art (the exhibition is currently at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin). More recently, she was given a solo show at the Camden Arts Centre in 2006 and she was one of three women artists included in the ‘3 × Abstraction’ exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York in 2005 alongside another medium, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin. In fact, Af Klint’s work has taken even longer than she imagined to command the art world’s attention: it was shown internationally for the first time by Maurice Tuchman in his exhibition ‘On The Spiritual in Art’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. ![]() This led to an entire body of work remaining intact and untouched by the market it’s like a time-capsule but one which is remarkably fresh in the way it relates to art now. On her death in 1944, her will stipulated that her work, which she bequeathed to a nephew, should not be seen in public for at least 20 years because, according to Af Klint, the world was not yet ready for its spiritual message. She succeeded in creating a self-generating occult symbol-system elaborated not only across many thousands of notebook pages but in several cycles of large-scale paintings, including the mural scheme for a planned temple that included the series ‘The Ten Largest’ (1907). This was several years before the project of abstraction - as identified with the work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian - really got underway in the 1910s.Īf Klint’s split artistic identity is unusual because of its particular circumstance and the scale and ambition of her radically innovative and abstract work. Trained in the 1880s, Af Klint produced two distinct and different bodies of work: the conventional landscapes and portraits of her professional persona and also - of far greater interest - numerous paintings that we would now count as ‘abstract’. ![]() Hilma af Klint was a professional artist working in Stockholm as the 19th century turned into the 20th she was also a spiritualist and medium who believed that her paintings were dictated by higher powers. ![]()
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