Hilma af Klint: Seeing is believing

(Swedish, 1862–1944)

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist known for her large-scale abstract paintings and botanical drawings. Her works combined many aspects of scientific illustration, geometry, and color theory, as evident in The Ten Largest (1907), a 10-canvas series representing the cycle of life. Like most abstract artists at the time, many of her works were inspired by Spiritism and Theosophy, although she was not part of the larger movement that consisted of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Throughout her lifetime, women in many fields turned to spiritualism as a way to overcome gender conventions, and in the beginning of 1896, af Klint formed a group, De Fem (The Five), and held spiritual meetings and séances. Born in Sweden in 1862 into a middle-class family, she studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and was trained in classical drawing and painting techniques. Af Klint’s landscape and portraiture work were rarely exhibited. She never shared her abstract work to her contemporaries, and wanted them hidden from the world until society was ready for it. She died in the fall of 1944, leaving behind 1,300 non-figurative works that have never been shown. The artist specified in her will that the work be kept secret for at least 20 years after her death and never be split up. In 2019, the Guggenheim held a survey of the artist’s work titled Hilma af Klint: Paintings of the Future. – Artnet.com