A groundbreaking study of visionary artist Hilma af Klint.
Tracey Bashkoff is Director, Collections and Senior Curator, at the
Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York. Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral
researcher and
lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of
Arts at Radboud
University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Daniel Birnbaum is the Director
of the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm. Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at
University College
London. Vivien Greene is a Guggenheim curator. David Max Horowitz
is Curatorial
Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Andrea Kollnitz is
Assistant
Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm
University. Helen
Molesworth is the Chief Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles.
Julia Voss is a writer and art critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung.
In the wake of the acclaimed documentary Beyond the Visible comes
an extensive catalogue of the Swedish artist, whose revolutionary
work as the first abstract painter was dismissed because she was a
woman.
*Globe and Mail*
The project of Hilma af Klint and her female colleagues was the
result of great maturity, of confidence and collective efforts,
performed both in work and in life.
*Women's Art Journal*
The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is
delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have
been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like
news that is new again.
*New Yorker*
The current celebration of af Klint's paintings suggests the
primacy of visual communication should be backdated. The
retrospective also underscores the important role that women played
in its emergence.
*Art in America*
The Guggenheim Museum offers a revisionary chapter about the start
of modern abstraction in its current headliner, “Hilma af Klint:
Paintings for the Future,” introducing works that this Swedish
artist and mystic made in 1906-7.
*New York Times*
af Klint's contribution, arrayed here in all its abundant
originality, threatens to reduce to a footnote the mostly male
history of esoteric abstraction.
*Artforum*
Af Klint's ascendancy feels inevitable: She could be viewed as a
heroine for our current moment, an artist who rejected commercial
success, resisted the pull of self-publicity, and challanged the
myth of individual authorship.
*Bookforum*
The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is
delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have
been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like
news that is new again.
*New Yorker*
The mother of all revisionist shows of Modernism.
*New York Times*
Profoundly moving. ... It is as though, in our apocalyptic time, we
need af Klint’s work now more than ever, and the purity of vision
and intent it represents.
*Brooklyn Rail*
A week after I saw [af Klint's paintings], their pulsing loveliness
remains undimmed in my mind, like a self-replenishing sense memory
of summer.
*Washington Post*
[The paintings are] talismanic, vibrating with hidden mystical
meaning. ... they represent the enduring evolution of the entire
cosmos, the triumphant union of dualities.
*4Columns*
The paintings tap into the buzzy zeitgeist of occult
spirituality.
*Huffington Post*
The show feels like both a transmission from an unmapped other
world and a perfectly logical correction to the history of Modern
art.
*Artnet*
The canvases are massive and their idiosyncratic shapes, squiggles,
and colors provide the viewer with an overwhelming sense of
wonder.
*Hyperallergic*
The art, fearfully esoteric and influenced by its creator’s séances
and spiritualism, matches a present mood of restless searching.
*New York Magazine*
Klint's biomorphoc compositions call to mind horticultural diagrams
conveived on psychedelics - and showcase a level of mysticism not
found in successors like Kandinsky.
*Cultured*
Demands that we rethink, re-evaluate and revise the lineage of art
history.
*Wall Street Journal*
Af Klint set about composing for posterity an alluring eye-music
that echoed back the complex psyche of her age.
*BBC*
Though she looked conservative, af Klint was nothing if not
radical.
*Paris Review*
The case of Hilma af Klint is among the most fascinating in art
history.
*WNYC*
[A] superb catalog.
*The New York Times*
Af Klint was not part of the larger abstract art movement so
populated by men, but many of her paintings—vibrant, strange
paintings inspired by her deep interest in Spiritism and
Theosophy—predate those famous as pioneers of the style.
*Observer*
Without precedent in the history of art.
*Abitare*
Somewhat like the biomorphic forms of a later artist like Joan
Miró, many of these pieces play with geometry and floral shapes
that frequently overlap as they seem to swim across the canvas.
*NYC City Guide*
[af Klint's] striking artwork expresses a vision of non-figurative
art that was ahead of her time and establishes her as a pioneer of
abstract art.
*Barnebys*
One of the most overlooked artists of the 20th century.
*Galerie*
She had a penchant for the occult – a “commission” from a spirit at
a seance inspired her to create her most striking paintings...
*The Economist*
Gorgeous book…. The implications of these works are not only
gargantuan, but also infinitely pleasurable to look at. And as
written about in this wonderful volume, great to read about. By the
time you put down this book, Hilma af Klint will be embedded in
your visual library forever.
*Vulture*
[af Klint's] art’s power is in its secrecy, its marking-off of
sacred space. Its period of gestation, of waiting for humanity to
catch up, is a demonstration of its sincerity.
*Sabat Magazine*
Klint created her own optical language with visual, chromatic,
structural, and narrative syntax. Her artistic ship sails some of
the deepest waters around.
*Vulture*
Af Klint did not ask for her work to be destroyed, only delayed.
She did not wait for the world to discover her paintings. The world
had to wait for them.
*Garage*
[The exhibition] remains as radical as ever and offers a welcome
retort to modernism's male-centric narrative.
*Elle*
'Paintings for the Future' endorses Klint’s mystical conviction
that the spiral symbolizes the dualities of the universe—good and
evil, male and female, known and unknown—slowly reaching
equilibrium.
*Artforum*
![]() |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
![]() |