Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Guggenheim Museum - New York

By Taliesin Thomas

The hidden treasures of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944) have finally realized their long overdue debut in a superlative retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York: “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.” This euphoric show presented af Klint’s esoteric oeuvre in the ‘museum-temple’ atmosphere of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece, a fitting environment to showcase the formal experimentation and mystical energy of af Klint’s masterful works. This was the first major U.S. exhibition devoted to her art and simultaneously offered a re-evaluation of non-objective painting and a reconsideration of modernism and its development in an otherwise male-dominated lineage.

Af Klint attended Stockholm’s prestigious royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1882 to 1887. She enjoyed early career success, yet the confines of her academic training resulted in her desire to create an original form of abstract imagery that defied her era. In 1896 af Klint formed a spiritual group with four other women-De Fem (The Five)-to explore channeling as a manner of insight into the artistic process. Other philosophical and religious influences cited on the wall texts accompanying her works-including Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, Medieval European traditions, Christianity and Lutheranism-attest to the diversity of systems that can be considered in conjunction with af Klint’s practice. By 1906 she had begun to paint radically abstract works to express her interest in these spiritual realms coupled with scientific advances, notably those that emphasized the so-called ‘materiality of phenomena’ that cannot be detected by normal human senses. Her ambition to realize this kind of ‘supersensory consciousness’ through art yielded a body of work that invites diverse interpretation.

Installation view of “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald.

Disregarding representational content in favor of ethereal explorations, af Klint’s largest works on canvas abound with undulating vibrations and fluid curlicues that are equally balanced by her orderly series of smaller paintings from 1915. Those works address the possibilities of arcane artistic geometries and geometrical structures, offering an aesthetic translation of mathematical mysteries through paint. Af Klint pulls us deep into her cosmos, and her lyrical garden landscapes and symbolically exploded erotica reveal the whimsical charms of the beyond. The crown jewel of the exhibit was the suite of ten unabashedly beautiful polychrome paintings filled with galactic seashells, spinning flowers, biomorphic spirals, colorful primordial chaos and sacred secrecies emerging from the void. The overflowing energy of these works possess all the power of af Klint’s mystical vision writ large and suggest the ‘unseen spirits’ that informed her work. The eccentric intensity of af Klint’s art offers a surprise at every turn, and her works often features the binaries of form and formlessness in a single canvas.

The Guggenheim’s outstanding presentation of af Klint’s retrospective is both a renewed vision of the past and a contemporary look at her abundant multiverse. The artist referred to her output as “the great commission”-some twenty-six thousand pages of writing and twelve hundred paintings. Her art certainly raises a host of questions about diverse topics such as occultism, spirituality, canonicity and classification. My personal encounter with af Klint’s art was like stepping into an exquisite space-time of her singular design, and the points of connection found therein were extraordinarily inspirational. The totalized helix of af Klint’s artistic reality is an exercise in genesis and dissolution-she takes us into majestic subatomic realms while bursting our sense of brilliance. Her pioneering efforts and imaginative visions reach far across the universe while providing a mode of spiritual engagement with art that reconfigures our understanding of magic made manifest.

(October 12, 2018 - April 23, 2019)

Taliesin Thomas is an artist-philosopher, writer, educator, and aesthetician based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the founding director of AW Asia (2007-present). She has lectured widely on contemporary Chinese art and has been published in ARTPULSE, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCCA) and ArtAsiaPacific magazine. She holds an MA from Columbia University and is currently a PhD candidate in art theory and philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.