Mind-blowing: The National Gallery of Ireland’s Hilma af Klint exhibition is a revelation

At the National Gallery of Ireland’s mind-blowing exhibition on the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, the first thing you see is a series of delicate charcoal and graphite sketches.

There is a trio: a jug, a lamp and a spiral staircase. After that, a study of a male nude, in which the artist has, in places, gone right under the skin. There is hair, a straggly beard, a well-toned arm; but there is also raw sinew and bone. All were made in the 1880s.

Beyond are some gentle portraits and landscapes, two paintings of veiled women, one of whom is fully shrouded. There is a pair of larger canvases, Serenity of the Evening and Sunrise, of which Whistler or Turner would have been proud.

Chosen from a wide array of works – when she died, in 1944, af Klint left about 1,300 paintings, plus 124 notebooks and reams of writing, to her nephew – these drawings feature some clever symbolism: the vessel, the light, the ascension, the allusion to what lies beneath.

But all you are likely to think at first is what beautiful drawings these are. The lamp, in particular, glows in a way that is almost transcendent.

Still, that’s not the mind-blowing part. Even if you’re familiar with af Klint’s astonishing works you’re likely to be unprepared for the revelation of the next phase of this cleverly paced exhibition. Around the corner, then the revelation: abstraction, symbolism, surrealism, spiritualism, divinity, bold colour blocks and such a punch of power that it feels, to me at least, as if the air in the space has a different charge.

There are the indigo blues, sage greens and golds of two Primordial Chaos paintings from the WU/Rose Series – af Klint made this branch of her work in series with sequences numbers – and the starker blacks, whites and pinks that follow.

It is not all abstraction. Muscular figures that wouldn’t be out of place in an etching by William Blake, that earlier visionary artist and writer, stand with crosses or in cruciform poses. There are circles and spirals, shell shapes, a chalice, eternal arcs.

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In one of the Evolution paintings, from 1908, a black dog lounges against the bottom left of the canvas, like a debauched wino, as red lines radiate across and up to a much more saintly white version, striding to a brighter future.

There is also a whole library of symbolism, elucidated in the excellent catalogue notes and exhibition texts, but you don’t need to be fluent in them to experience the onslaught of the complex, ordered yet wild and esoteric energy these works contain.

Going back to that first gallery, if only to experience the energy shift again, I note that those two paintings, Serenity and Sunrise, were made in 1907, at the same time as af Klint was working on The WU/Rose Series. This was not an artist who suddenly discovered, or progressed to, abstraction. She had two quite separate practices – and, like so many of us, a polite veneer and a wild inner life. So what exactly was going on?

I first heard of Hilma af Klint in the early 2000s. She was an artist, it was said, whose work was so powerful she had requested it be hidden for 50 years after her death.

She had lived on an isolated Swedish island, completely separated from the art world, and invented abstract art long before anyone else. She had painted a monochrome square, years before Kazimir Malevich had shocked the world with his own.

And, to crown all this wonderful strangeness, she was told what to paint by spirit guides.

I loved the idea of a trove of incendiary art, hidden away, biding its time. And if spirit guides were into abstract art, who knew where exhibitions might lead us next?

Very little of this account turned out to be true, yet the myths persist.

We tend to detach her so much from reality, but she was a normal lady: she took the tram, she had her breakfast …

—  Janet McLean

Hilma af Klint was born at the Karlberg Palace, just outside Stockholm, in 1862. Her father had been a director of the Swedish military academy – hence the palatial birthplace – and her grandfather a naval cartographer. Summers were spent at the family country estate.

She went to drawing class and, in 1882, enrolled at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, which had become the first state institution in Europe to open art training to women, including allowing them to attend life-drawing class.

After graduation she found a shared studio and was commissioned to make drawings for Stockholm’s veterinary institute, studying the cadavers of dead horses, just as George Stubbs and Mary Spencer had done in London a century before.

She continued to take commissions and exhibit throughout her life, holding exhibitions of both strands of her work, albeit separately.

That’s the outsider-artist fiction laid to rest, at least.

Neither did af Klint refuse to allow anyone to see her work for 50 years after her death, as the exhibition’s curator Janet McLean explains. “She had made a little note: she had added a symbol in 1932 to say that certain notebooks shouldn’t be seen for 20 years.”

Af Klint had also made miniature copies of some of her paintings in watercolour in the little books, “like travelling copies, so she could talk about her work and show it to people”, McLean says. “She’d marked the notebooks including the Paintings for the Temple with the symbol, so it’s often thought to imply she didn’t want those paintings to be seen.

“I don’t think it’s unusual she did that. A lot of the writing in the notebooks is quite personal. Apart from that, she did this in 1932, and she died in 1944. She didn’t go back to revise it: think what was happening in the world at that time.

“We tend to detach her so much from reality, but she was a normal lady: she took the tram, she had her breakfast …”

In fact, as McLean notes, af Klint “had hoped that a dedicated building would be constructed to display the Paintings for the Temple in a continuous spiralling sequence”.

The idea that she invented abstract art was another fabrication. Beyond Europe and the post-Columbian Americas, cultures have had, and continue to have, non-representational art at the core of their making.

In Ireland, Newgrange and the Lough Crew Cairns, in Co Meath, include abstract patterns carved into the rock about 5,000 years ago. Malevich painted his Black Square, which he described as part of his “desperate struggle to free art from the ballast of the objective world”, in 1915. Af Klint made her own square colour-block series, Statement of the Physical Plan, from 1916 on.

Malevich and af Klint probably weren’t aware of one another. Instead, they, alongside their contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in art, and WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw in literature, were all drawing from the well of influences that coalesced in the latter half of the 19th century.

Darwin’s theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, which had been published shortly before af Klint’s birth, alongside the social changes brought in by the industrial revolution, and scientific advances such as the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity, irrevocably altered many people’s understanding of humanity’s place in both society and eternity.

Spiritualism added the occult to Christianity through mediums, seances and spirit guides. And in 1857 the Theosophical Society, led by Helena Blavatsky, drew in elements of eastern philosophies, Kabbalah and Hermeticism – a heady mix of beliefs from which Rudolf Steiner eventually split to establish his Anthroposophical Society, which af Klint joined in 1920.

For visual arts, perhaps one of the most influential texts to come out of this melting pot was Annie Besant and Charles W Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms, which appeared from the Theosophical Publishing House in 1901. In it they apply physical, spiritual and emotional values to colours, and outline how the auras of thoughts, feelings and objects can be not just represented but captured in visual form.

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All this is eruditely unpacked in the exhibition catalogue, by Pádraic E Moore. You can also see it in the final space of the exhibition, where af Klint, following Steiner’s art instructions, made a series of watercolours, On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees.

After staring at a flower or a grain, she would close her eyes to see the after-image, then paint this in watercolour on wet paper. Give them time, as they are mesmerising, especially shown alongside the very beautiful and “correct” botanical paintings af Klint also made throughout her life.

The strangest of all the af Klint rumours is the one that turns out to be true. She did claim spirit guides, saying she received her first spirit message in 1891. She formed a group, the Five (de Fem), with four other women for the purpose of meditating to induce trancelike states for automatic writing.

According to af Klint, in 1906 one spirit guide, Amaliel, instructed the group to begin a great work – which became the Paintings for the Temple. Initially, af Klint had said the paintings were made through her but not by her, although she changed her position as time went on.

This was the reason the curator Leah Dickerman used to exclude af Klint from the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, which ran at the New York institution in 2012 and 2013, saying, as Jennifer Higgie noted in Frieze Magazine at the time, that she “was not convinced that af Klint saw her paintings as art”.

The whiff of sexism is hard to ignore: male writers and artists have claimed divine inspiration and dream influence throughout the history of art without a tarnishing of their reputations. And what is art if not a way of exploring what we apprehend without necessarily comprehending? (For a wider view on the work of af Klint in context with other women artists, read Higgie’s book The Other Side, which was published in 2024.)

I first saw af Klint’s work in 2004 at the Douglas Hyde’s Gallery 2, when John Hutchinson curated a tiny selection as part of his Paradise series. A small publication, Hilma af Klint: The Greatness of Things, followed in 2005, in which Hutchinson wrote that he believed “the true significance of Hilma’s visionary art has yet to be fully recognised”.

He was both right and prescient, and the exhibition and book stayed with me, although it would be a number of years before I saw af Klint’s work again, when it caused a sensation at Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopaedic Palace, the central exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2013.

One of the most moving sets of paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition is Series 1, made in 1919, between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, when the first World War was still heavy in memory. Through seven small white canvases, a line emerges, then shapes and, finally, what you could perhap describe as a geometrical diagram of hope.

Exactly 100 years later, one of af Klint’s wishes was realised, although not perhaps as she might have imagined it, when the Guggenheim museum installed her work spiralling up its curving rotunda for the blockbuster Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.

The Hilma af Klint Foundation has requests from all over the world, says McLean, who has been working on the Dublin exhibition since 2021. “Now, I think a lot of the paintings are going to be resting for a while.”

Given the energy they emit, I’m not surprised.

Hilma af Klint: Artist and Visionary is at the National Gallery of Ireland until February 7th, 2027