This exhibition is at The Serpentine Gallery Hyde Park until May 15 – and there is no entrance fee.
Hilma af Klint left instructions that her abstract work should not be exhibited in public until 20 years after her death. She lived from 1862 to 1944. She preceded several artists who have manifested a similar style including several Surrealists – and Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Swedish born Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her influences included the spiritual realm and the occult and she also worked into her pictures parts of flowers and swans, the Christian cross and other animals apart from swans (One black and one white dog is in one of her awe inspiring works) in addition to swans – the animal influence apparently due to working for some time with vetinary enterprises and being influenced artistically by this. She joined a group and formed a five member assembly who conducted séances to encounter what they believed to be spirits who wished to communicate via pictures, leading to experiments with automatic writing and drawing, which pre-dated the Surrealists by several decades. People may um and aah about this but it produced results and fine and unique ones!
The Paintings for the Temple was commissioned from an entity which the group called Amaliel to create this most important body of work. 193 mostly abstract oeuvres created a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds. Shells, snakes, lilies and crosses emerged in her works, and one of her mentors was Rudolf Steiner who was an anthroposophist.
Hilma af Klint studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm where she graduated in 1887. Try to make it in any weather to see her breathtaking takes on several subjects including the said swans, triangles, flower parts and magical canvasses which beg to be interpreted as having a deep meaning and emotion in each and every one. Even the album of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd sports an illustration which may have originally been garnered from a Klint painting. Enjoy.
Penny Nair Price