Hilma Af Klint: Painting the Unseen at the Serpentine Gallery
I recently visited the Serpentine gallery in Hyde Park to see the exhibition ‘Painting the Unseen’ by Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint. Klint (1862-1944) was an abstract painter who wanted her artwork not to be seen publicly until 20 years after her death and it came to be that her work was not shown to the public until a further 2o years.
Hilma Af Klint was a spiritualist and a part of a private group with 4 other female artists, calling themselves ‘the five’. They conducted seances to connect with spirits that wished to communicate through pictures and drawings. This fascination with the Spiritualist movement can be seen throughout the exhibition with her painting reflecting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.
Looking around the exhibition, I was struck at first by the use of colour and shapes in her work, with blue representing the female and yellow for the male. The use of symbols and motifs also identify her fascination with the spiritualist movement, as Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner was a mentor to Klint.
It can be seen that many dualities are represented within her paintings such as science and religion; the spiritual and material; good and evil and man and woman. Religion and science can be seen to chart a major influence within her paintings with lines and shapes within the paintings depicting paths of opposing sides leading towards a harmony between the two.
