Hilma af Klint
Visible and invisible work
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) trained at Stockholm’s Royal Academy and supported herself through portraits, landscapes, and botanical subjects. Alongside that public career, she developed a radical body of work concerned with forces beyond ordinary sight.
Her spiritual group, The Five, recorded séances through texts and automatic drawings. From 1906 she began The Paintings for the Temple, using diagrams, spirals, letters, and biomorphic forms to explore matter, spirit, polarity, and evolution.
Scale and sequence
The Ten Largest maps stages of life across unusually large surfaces; color and scale act directly on the viewer rather than illustrating a conventional narrative.
The Swan moves from paired birds toward geometry. Af Klint catalogued her work carefully and delayed public access to parts of the archive, which helps explain why broad recognition came only decades after her death.
