Hilma af Klint was a person beyond her time, when women were oppressed and society had a standard of living and perceiving reality. Her earlier works are based on biological structures and organisms. Later on through her works, it shows that she was influenced by nature, biology, and geometric structures as well. Hilma af Klint's paintings are "deeply involved with spiritualism, deep spiritual guidance, and a belief in radical holistic connectivity"(Dover) by presenting her work as both image and diagram. Often, Hilma had five friends that would meet and perform seances, called The Five. "Taking turns serving in the role of medium, they then drew the images received from a collection of spirits known as the High Masters."(Ventura) Her work was not presented until twenty years after she died.
Some aspects of her paintings are so precise and symmetrical, while there are aspects of her paintings that feel almost clumsy or rushed. That relationship of how those two aspects play off each other is what really draws me toward her work. The color is symbolic, she tries to radiate the spiritual energy of Gaia, a mother goddess who resided over the earth in Greek mythology, in her paintings, something she wants the viewer to connect with. The sheer size of her paintings almost engulfs the viewer in what she portrays.
How Hilma af Klint wants her viewer to relate to work, especially by keeping it locked away until a different generation of the audience viewed it, is what I can relate to. The devotion to spiritualism and how it interacts with nature is something I found to be meaningful. In the Guggenheim, I found myself taking my time and absorbing what I saw, something I want people to do with my own art. In Hinduism, relating to my identity, I feel as though most people think more about the spiritualism engulfing my religion than the purpose of the rituals, and the aspect of that in itself is what I could connect with in her paintings. How that it was spiritualism, in its essence, is what drove Hilma af Klint to create these paintings.
https://frieze.com/article/secret-seances-and-high-masters-making-mystic-painter-hilma-af-klint
https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/who-was-hilma-af-klint-at-the-guggenheim-paintings-by-an-artist-ahead-of-her-time
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