Hilma AF Klint

Hilma af Klint painted as though she was channeling the universe. Fascinated from childhood by botany and mathematics, she began her career painting landscapes and portraits, but other preoccupations stirred within her: questions of spirit, unseen energies, patterns too vast for the eye alone.

Her art was inseparable from her spiritual practice. With a circle of female artists called The Five, she held séances, heard voices from "High Masters," and was inspired by the Theosophical Society and Rudolf Steiner's theories. Working tirelessly to map life's hidden dimensions, she would paint to the point of physical collapse.

By 1906, her canvases featured radiant geometries of spirals and orbs, impregnated with symbols, letters, and words, anticipating the later embrace of abstraction by Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and others. Her vast painted cycles--like her works for the Temple and The Ten Largest--often depicted dualities: inside and out, the earthly and the esoteric, man and woman, good and evil.

Living as a vegetarian, questioning the fixity of gender, af Klint was clearly before her time, yet very much of it too, and pretty much uncelebrated in her day. Her prodigious output lay unseen for decades, locked away by her own instruction. Only in the 1980s did the world begin to recognize her as a true pioneer of abstract art.

This book invites you into her visionary world, via a luminous selection of her works and a detailed essay distilling their complexity. Her once-secret universe is revealed to us anew.

Janis Mink studied art history at Smith College and the University of Hamburg. She works as an adjunct professor, writer, and curator.