Saturday, December 04, 2021

Before her time

Born in Stockholm in 1862, Hilma af Klint began her artistic career as an academy-educated painter of naturalistic landscapes and portraits. Influenced by the spiritual movements and scientific discoveries of her era, however, af Klint soon strove to express abstract concepts beyond what the eye can see. She began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to rid their own artwork of representational content. Yet while many of her better-known contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings largely private.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really love her work. If you haven´t yet, I would recommend watching the movie made about her:
https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/beyondthevisiblehilmaafklint
Best, Christina

Kim Carney said...

Thank you, Christina! I just happened upon this and had never heard of her!

Anonymous said...

Neither had I before the movie! One of the curators said they really need to rewrite modern art history now...