Hilma af Klint described her process: “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”
Born in 1862, the Swedish woman was one of the world’s first abstract artists, well ahead of other founding fathers of 20th century abstract painting such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich.
While af Klint made some effort to display her work during the early 20th century, she later requested that her abstract paintings remain hidden until two decades after her death. She believed that the public of her time was not ready for the work and that an audience in the future might be.
Although the af Klint family unwrapped her work in the mid-1960s, it took five more decades for the artist to receive major institutional recognition, with a 2013 Moderna Museet exhibition in Stockholm, and a 2018-19 Solomon R Guggenheim Museum show in New York.
