Viewing the work of Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim was an amazing experience for me. Especially because in the past year or so I have been on quest of becoming more spiritual and more in tuned with energy and the universe. Deepak Chopra unpacks the theme of the universe in his book, “You are the Universe.” He says, “First, one must realize that the big bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe but of the current universe. Ignoring for now whether the current universe was created from another universe, physics can’t actually trace the cosmos back to the absolute beginning.”
The paintings at the Guggenheim opened up new perspectives for me and allowed me to delve into the mind of another spiritual and creative human being. In Paintings for the Future, each painting delivered a different message. All the exhibits however were centered around the themes involving human life and its stages, spirituality, the human body, the universe, and the future.
In the exhibit, The Ten Largest, at first I just saw ten large, colorful and abstract paintings that I did not quite understand. However, after really examining the paintings, I realized that these paintings depicted the many stages of life. One painting appeared to depict the woman’s reproductive system. It appeared to show fallopian tubes connected to the uterus. The dotted lines that were connecting throughout the painting reminded me of the biological make-up of the human body. This made all the sense in the world because human life starts within the body of a woman. I belief that each of the ten paintings represented a significant stage in human life from beginning to end.
As I began to walk up each higher level of the Guggenheim, each painting that I viewed stuck me in a different way than the others. Some stood out to me more than others. However, the theme of life and the body and the universe and spirituality was constant. Some paintings seemed to depict self-portraits portraying many different aspects and attributes of self. These self-portraits seem to depict more than just the physical appearance of self.
To me, it is important to realize that your body is not the most important attribute of self, it is the soul. Once, the physical had expired, it is one’s soul that remains in the universe. When you connect with others, you do not not connect in the physical form, your souls and energy connect. This was depicted in many of the paintings that I viewed in the Guggenheim. In “Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos,” the idea of the human body being separate from the soul is put into perspective. “Thus the soul, like the body, consists of three distinct members—the sentient soul, the mind soul, and the con- sciousness soul.” Rudolph Steiner continues by saying, “Just as our bodily nature works from be- low upwards to set limits on the soul, spirituality works from above downwards to expand it. The more our soul is filled with what is true and good, the broader and more in- clusive its eternal aspect becomes.”
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