A comprehensive survey of the career of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the show spans from her early works on traditional themes, her automatic drawings and her most outstanding series, including Paintings for the Temple, Parsifal, the Atom Series, to the watercolors of her final years.
If the artist mainly exhibited her more traditional figurative paintings in her lifetime, she rarely presented her abstract art publicly, and never showed it in mainstream artworld settings. She instead sought to share it with likeminded spiritual communities but struggled to find an enthusiastic audience. Coming to believe the world was not yet prepared to accept her work, Hilma af Klint took pains to store and catalog it so that the society of the future would receive it in an orderly fashion. Her art had to wait nearly one century for the recognition it deserved.
In 1906, she began her most important and ground-breaking project, on which she spent almost a decade. Her Paintings for the Temple comprise a total of 193 paintings and drawings in which the artist creates a new, nonobjective art informed by her relationship with spiritualism and other philosophies.
Hilma af Klint
