Hilma Af Klint

Hilma Af Klimt was an early 20th Century Swedish artist who experimented with abstract painting as a way to reflect her spiritualist beliefs and mysticism. Her first non-objective series The Paintings for the Temple was a series of spiritualist works were imagined to be installed in a spiral temple, however this never occurred.

Hilma Af Klint Exhibition installation at Guggenheim Museum

Left to right: Hilma af Klint Group X, Altarpiece, no 1 1915, HaK187; Group IX/UW, The dove, no 2 1915, HaK174. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation. Photos: The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

She used large scale, high saturation colours with high colour contrast and otherworldly shapes in her works in an attempt to articulate a spiritual or mystical reality that people of the early 20th Century were not familiar with or accustomed to seeing. Thus, she left instructions that there works were not to be exhibited until 20 years after her death.