Abstract paintings Gallery

Serpentine Galleries gift suggestions an event of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), who's today regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. While her paintings weren't seen openly until 1986, the woman work from very early twentieth century pre-dates the first strictly abstract paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich.

Find out more

"The show of the year" - The Sunday Times

This Serpentine exhibition makes a speciality of af Klint's human body of work, The Paintings for Temple, which dates from 1906–15. The sequential nature of her tasks are showcased by the addition when you look at the event of numerous paintings from key show, some never-before displayed in britain.

After graduating from Royal Academy of good Arts in Stockholm in 1887, af Klint took a studio in the town where she produced and exhibited old-fashioned surroundings, botanical drawings and portraits. But by 1886 she had abandoned the conventions she discovered on Academy in preference of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the religious realm together with occult. She privately joined up with four various other feminine performers to form a group known as ‘The Five’. They conducted séances to encounter what they considered to be spirits whom wished to communicate via pictures, causing experiments with automated writing and drawing, which pre-dated the Surrealists by several years.

In 1905, af Klint received a ‘commission’ from an entity, which the group known as Amaliel, to generate her primary human anatomy of work, . Comprising 193 predominately abstract paintings in various show and subgroups, the artist painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material globes; great and wicked; man and woman; religion and science. This significant work charted the impact of science and religion on af Klint’s works, from the development of electromagnetic waves toward spiritual teachings of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. Steiner was af Klint’s guide along with his existence inside her life lead to the period getting more orderly with depictions of symbols and themes, such as shells, snakes, lilies and crosses, from his spiritual action.

Hilma af Klint painted in near separation from European avant-garde. Fearing that she'd not be comprehended, she stipulated that her abstract work should always be held from the public eye for twenty years after the woman death. Although the works are not exhibited for a further two decades, it afterwards came into existence recognized alongside the wider context of modernism in the change for the 20th century.

The event is co-curated by the Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with Daniel Birnbaum, Director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm.