COMMENTARY BY: VITTORIA CARDONA
CREATIVE, CONCEPTOR, GRAPHIC ARTIST
Costa Rica

PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE

A revelation for humanity

Throughout the ages, women have struggled to be recognized as writers, artists, scientists, and revolutionaries. Many brilliant women artists who were ahead of their time, are only now being recognized. Hilma af Klint is such a woman. Her courage and contribution to art has until now, made a strong impact on humanity. 

From her birth in Stockholm in 1862, to her many years of work as an artist and medium, to her later exhibitions in prestigious museums all over the world, Hilma af Klint has held her own ground with courage and commitment. She was modest and believed more in her message than in being a famous artist and her work remained mysteriously hidden for many years after her death.  Sometimes Klint leaves the world with more questions than answers. But always her message is focused on activating human consciousness through striking visuals, abstract geometrical forms, symbolic colors, and signs and codes. 

Hilma lived through the dramatic events surrounding the second world war and passed away soon afterwards. By the 1940’s the world was on the verge of a dramatic change. It was a time of political, scientific and cultural evolution. Abstract art was already a reality, but Hilma’s work was born from a unique, highly personal and intimate experience.

Like Picasso and other artists before her, her first paintings were figurative, but soon her subversive spirit emerged. She courageously carried a commitment to mysticism, spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, theosophy, and forms of spirituality that were popular in those troubled periods both in Europe and the United States. This was the time of artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian and a reconciliation between traditional spiritual beliefs and science based on the discovery of X-rays, electromagnetic waves, and an era of relativism. In many ways this would lead to an entirely new way of looking at reality and a reconciliation between traditional religious beliefs and scientific advancements. Out of this movement, a new awareness of the global plurality of religions would emerge and a sense of unity through diversity. 

Hilma’s work goes far beyond the visual and art for the eye alone. She had the courage to channel her mystical idiosyncratic geometry into a living library of ideas and possibilities. In her own evolution, Hilma found solidarity with a group of like-minded women who called themselves The Five. These women, or mediums, sought guides in the spirit world to send them messages that would eventually take the form of art.

Hilma created a visual language that speaks through a highly non-objective form of abstraction that touches the sacred and turns the conventional way of thinking about art on its head. Her work embodies symbolic and profound color combinations, such as blue for the feminine, yellow for the masculine, and green for the unity of the two. These forms interlock, or come into coalition suggesting the interrelationship of all living and inanimate matter. Klint works with the spiraling circle, which exists in all indigenous cultures and evokes the mystery and flowing beauty of the universe. She evokes the symbiotic energy of plants, and presents a set of universal equations using words, letters and symbols. She also transcribed her philosophy into an ocean of charts and codes on thousands of sheets of paper, as well. She herself said:

far beyond the vision

Hilma’s work is prolific. It is estimated that she painted up to 1,300 abstract works. More than a hundred notebooks with notes and sketches have been preserved. Hilma’s interest in spiritualism had started half a century before her death when a spiritual guide commissioned her in 1906 to prepare an artistic message in secret to humanity. In the decade that followed, Hilma produced nearly 200 paintings in an attempt to represent the deep underlying spirit of the world.

In addition to the connections between the material and the spiritual, Klint was interested in very earthly dichotomies: the feminine and the masculine, and the light and the dark. Like many early philosophers, she conceived the dualities of opposites as the engine that makes the world go around. 

Hilma foresaw a time in the future when there would be ‘a viewer’, we humans, who would understand the message that she felt compelled to express. Perhaps with her delicately drawn cosmic circles she wanted to guide us towards those deep mystical revelations from her own experience and her own longing for transcendence. That desire, mysteriously enough remained secretly sleeping for two decades after she passed away. 

As Hilma af Klint gave essential meaning to how the universe is put together, a series of questions arise:

Was the public simply not ready before?

Did she break too much ground too soon? 

And are we prepared to receive her message now?

“Hilma af Klint, a woman of courage and a pioneer in her own form of art, challenges us to see differently, to awaken our own perceptions, to allow the codes of geometry, color, and symbols to activate and interact with our inner knowing and to remember who we are and where we’re headed.”