After breaking Guggenheim records, Hilma af Klint’s work is headed down under

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The recent rediscovery of her work has art historians reappraising her place in the canon of 20th century modernism, positioning her among the early pioneers of abstract art: Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

Art Gallery of NSW director Michael Brand said the exhibition was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discover the artistic achievements of a trailblazing artist who stood for too long outside the accepted story of European modernism.

“In an era of limited creative freedom for women, af Klint’s secret paintings became an outlet for her prodigious intelligence, spiritual quest and ground-breaking artistic vision,” said Dr Brand.

Speaking at the gallery’s 2021 program launch, Arts minister Don Harwin said the show was a major coup for Sydney with audiences having a rare opportunity to “marvel at her extraordinary vision of work”.

The Sydney show was conceived in 2015, he said, three years before Guggenheim exhibition. Not only did it demonstrate the curatorial foresight of the Art Gallery of NSW but the show would reinforce the state’s goal to be the premier visitor economy in the Asia Pacific.

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The show will be curated by Sue Cramer from Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, who collaborated with Nicholas Chambers, the Art Gallery of NSW’s senior curator of modern and contemporary international art.

Cramer said af Klint was a woman artist who was both ahead of her time and of her time.

Af Klint studied Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honours in 1887 and going on to become a successful landscape artist and portraitist installed in her own studio and earning her own living. From a young age she had been interested in spiritual matters and studied the Theosophic movement, then widely popular in Europe and the US, Cramer said.

Af Klint communed with spirits she dubbed ‘the Higher Ones’ through seances, with help from a circle of women named The Five, and believed her art flowed from these higher entities.

A large selection of works from the artist’s breakthrough years will be coming to Sydney. The Ten Largest 1906, paintings of monumental scale that explore the four stages of human development, predate Wassily Kandinsky’s seminal abstract work Composition IV by five years. Up to three metres high and two metres wide, they brim with wondrous arrangement of shapes and motifs.

Also coming to Sydney will be a large selection of works from the Paintings for the Temple series which were to have been installed in a spiral temple specially designed to transcend the physical world.

“She received what she called her commission and was entrusted with the task to paint a series of paintings on the astral plane and that would become her task from 1906 to 1915, creating 193 paintings within seven different series, some of which are extremely large and unlike anything that had been seen at all at the time they were made,” Cramer said.

In all, The Secret Paintings will feature 129 works, including drawings and notebooks loaned from Hilma af Foundation in Stockholm. A selection of notebooks give insights into the artist’s influences and processes.

“She thought her body of works had a message for the betterment of humanity and it was the paintings’ task and hers to convey those messages.”

”On the one hand her paintings clearly, as she sees them, originate in this ecstatic experience of spiritualist reception, but on the other hand what she was doing was well informed and in the social context of her times,” she said.

“She was very well read, she knew about science and botany, she knew about mathematics and she was aware of eastern philosophies. [She] was part of a time when there was a move among many people to reconcile religious beliefs with new scientific advances in electromagnetic waves and radioactive emissions.“