Saed News: Today, Hilma af Klint is recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract art, although she was largely unknown during her lifetime. She was born in 1862 in Sweden and developed an interest in spirituality, mysticism, and communication with the spirit world from a young age.
According to SAEDNEWS, af Klint, together with a group of women known as “The Five,” believed that they communicated with beings and spirits from another realm. In her later writings, she stated that these spirits asked her to create a series of paintings containing messages about life, the human soul, and the universe.
In 1906, at a time when abstract art had not yet formally emerged, af Klint began creating works that contained no landscapes, portraits, or recognizable objects. Instead, she used bright colors, circles, spirals, geometric lines, botanical symbols, and mysterious forms. Many of these works were created several years before the abstract paintings of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky.
Her most important series is “The Paintings for the Temple,” which consists of 193 works. She created them over approximately nine years and believed they would one day be housed in a special spiritual setting. Among them are large-scale paintings that symbolically depict the different stages of human life, from childhood to old age.
Interestingly, af Klint outwardly lived the life of a conventional painter. After studying at an art academy, she produced landscapes and portraits that matched the artistic tastes of her era. At the same time, however, she created hundreds of experimental and abstract works that were virtually unknown to the public.
During her lifetime, she produced more than 1,200 paintings and thousands of pages of notes. Nevertheless, she believed that people of her time were not ready to understand her work. For this reason, she requested that her artworks not be publicly displayed until many years after her death.
After her death in 1944, her works remained in storage for several decades. When researchers and art historians reexamined them, they realized that af Klint had been creating fully abstract paintings years before many of the most celebrated figures of modern art. This discovery prompted a reassessment of the history of abstract art.
Today, many experts believe that Hilma af Klint was not only one of the world's first abstract artists but that her work holds a unique place in art history because of its blend of art, spirituality, symbolism, and mystical thought.
