The Guggenheim Museum is currently showcasing the works of Hilma Af Klint, an abstract artist way before Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. Her exhibition titled Paintings for the future, holds all her paintings and art pieces throughout her lifetime.  Klint’s art focuses on the idea of spiritual guidance and the belief of holistic connectivity, along with theosophy. She believed we could communicate with spirits of other worlds, and included symbols and colors to translate what these spirits wanted.  She treats her paintings as artwork meant for a temple, aiming to represent a transplant reality between the observed world. Spirituality plays a huge role in her paintings, showcasing her ideas and beliefs as well as her relationship with different kinds of religion. All of these, of course, has a huge hold on what our identity means. Through her work, she examines gender, the spirit world, relationships with color and forms.

Klint examines her existence by first examining the world we are attached to. To many, the world or our existence all started from the Big Bang like Deepak Chopra, M.D.and Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D. reference in the expert from their book, You Are the Universe. They examine the time before the big bang, covering issues like the idea of time, our existence and all things impossible. It states, “In particular, physics can resort to the language of mathematics in the hopes that its existence doesn’t depend on which universe you happen to live in. Most of the speculation that follows keeps faith with mathematics as something eternally valid. ” They emphasize that what we can’t explain with numbers or when questions seem impossible, we restore to faith. Faith, something that can neither be proven or disproven.

In Klint’s Primordial Chaos, (one of the first pieces she created with her abstract style), she illustrates what she thought was the birth of the world. She includes this sense of duality of what she believed are essential principles of life. It also holds evidence of theosophy, a movement drawing in from different religions and philosophical ideas. It starts out with a circle, that later on explodes through the series and comes back together in the final piece. Similar to the big bang, but with the idea of coming back together, promoting unity. Klint also includes weird and random letterforms, of course, these words or symbols might not have any meaning to us but with careful examination, we can understand what Kint said. Each word or letterform are translated within her journals.

Group I, Primordial Chaos (1906–07) by Hilma af Klint

Within her paintings, Klint manages to explore gender in a more spiritual level by using color. She has abandoned the preconceived notions of pink and blue representing male or female. She uses yellow for the male, blue for female, while green represents the unity of both. She leaves behind the “women’s subject matter [that] was circumscribed by the mundane, the domestic worlds of animals and flowers, to which they were forcibly confined” but enforces “work on a cosmic scale.” (Ventura) During her last years, Klint took large measures to endure her paintings could be understood in the future, writing everything down in her journals. It’s also clear within her sketches and paintings that Klint envision a temple that resembles the swirls within her paintings. A place where the viewer would be able to walk in swirls to view her works, a place much like the Guggenheim.

Untitled 1931, Halmi Klint

Klint’s whole career and lifestyle surrounds her spirituality,  fully showcasing her ideologies. It’s impactful to view large paintings that capture another world and ideas different from our own. I believe it’s important to not necessarily show off our ideas of existence but to have an understanding of how that shapes our identity. In terms of my personal ideas and beliefs, I grew up within a religious household, we believed in one God and therefore followed his law. I was following the church’s rules before I could even say my own name, and as I got older, it became more of an expectation for me to continue. And I did, but I do wish that I could reflect on own my spiritual beliefs and understand them on a deeper level. There are times I feel disconnected and unsure but I think that through my own self-discovery and journey to find my own identity, I can call to question what it is that I actually believe in. But most importantly, how my beliefs affect me and my relationships with both my family and friends.