We went and saw Hilma Af Klint retrospective at London’s Serpentine Gallery over the weekend and it was incredible! The exhibition focuses on Klint’s series ‘The Paintings for the Temple’, which dates from 1906–15.
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887, Klint took a studio in the city where she produced and exhibited traditional landscapes, botanical drawings and portraits. However, by 1886 she had abandoned the conventions she learned at the Academy in favour of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult. She privately joined four other female artists to form a group called ‘The Five’. They conducted séances to encounter what they believed to be spirits who wished to communicate via pictures, leading to experiments with automatic writing and drawing, which pre-dated the Surrealists by several decades.
Hilma af Klint painted in near isolation from the European avant-garde. Fearing that she would not be understood, she stipulated that her abstract work should be kept out of the public eye for 20 years after her death. While the works were not exhibited for a further 20 years, it subsequently came to be understood alongside the broader context of modernism at the turn of the 20th century.
Read more here: serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/hilma-af-klint-painting-unseen
