Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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The final volume in a Catalogue Raisonné of the abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint, one of the first to be compiled for a Swedish artist, is released on October 31. She wrote and illustrated the book Kids Yoga, which was long-listed for the CILIP Carnegie Medal in 2018.

You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more.The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Af Klint’s work should be seen and appreciated in the series of paintings often depicting specific themes and this ground-breaking publication, divided into seven volumes, allows for this. Birnbaum has held the position of Rector at the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy at Frankfurt at Maim in Germany and has also actively written for Art Forum. In the wake of the acclaimed documentary Beyond the Visible comes an extensive catalogue of the Swedish artist, whose revolutionary work as the first abstract painter was dismissed because she was a woman. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

This extraordinary collection is edited by and copublished with Christine Burgin, and features an introduction by Iris Müller-Westermann. She worked on international exhibitions and catalogues of Alice Neel, Lee Bontecou, Paula Rego and Constant. Paintings for the Future' endorses Klint’s mystical conviction that the spiral symbolizes the dualities of the universe―good and evil, male and female, known and unknown―slowly reaching equilibrium. Brimming with quality reproductions of the artist’s work and with illustrations by Karin Eklund, it will appeal to all children wanting to learn more about the enchanting life and work of this groundbreaking artist. She explains not just Af Klint’s beliefs, but her relations with the occultist and reformer Rudolf Steiner and her efforts to exhibit some of her work to fellow spiritualists.The current celebration of af Klint's paintings suggests the primacy of visual communication should be backdated. Mixing psychology, Christianity and Buddhism, historical fantasy and science fiction, “new age” ideals were amazingly popular, particularly among educated women, who used those ideologies to carve themselves new social niches outside the suffocating strictures of church and family. Af Klint was not part of the larger abstract art movement so populated by men, but many of her paintings—vibrant, strange paintings inspired by her deep interest in Spiritism and Theosophy—predate those famous as pioneers of the style. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.

For them, science and mysticism were not exclusive practices, but part of the same essential framework for understanding the life forces around them. When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Voss suggests Af Klint was a pioneer of abstract painting, a label that fits in some ways – her work certainly isn’t representational in the normal sense – but jars in others. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future Edited with text by Tracey Bashkoff.

She has organized monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Luc Tuymans. Around the age of seventy, Hilma af Klint began to separate the documents and artworks she would preserve from those she would destroy. In recent years, her colorful, spiritually-minded body of work has reshaped art historical timelines, supplanting male artists like Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers, who have long been regarded as the pioneers of the 20th-century movement.

Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today.Af Klint was not part of the larger abstract art movement so populated by men, but many of her paintings―vibrant, strange paintings inspired by her deep interest in Spiritism and Theosophy―predate those famous as pioneers of the style.