Hilma af Klint

Each one of Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest paintings measures over three metres tall. She believed that a spirit commissioned her to create the works, and she created them with the intention for all ten of the pieces to hang together, in a circular arrangement. The paintings explore the four stages of life: Childhood, Youth, Adulthood and Old Age. The theme of Adulthood occupies the highest number of paintings, with four pieces dedicated to this era of human experience. This painting is the first of those, with a mauve coloured ground, and detailed with her abstract language of shapes, spirals, botantical imagery and looping letters.

• Artist Hilma af Klint
• Artwork The Ten Largest, Group IV No. 5, Adulthood
• Material FSC Certified paper and wood
• Date of work 1907
• Credit Original: Tempura on paper, mounted on canvas 321 × 237 cm Hilma af Klint Foundation

Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) was a Swedish artist, considered to be the first abstract artist in Western art history. Talented in mathematics and botany, she studied painting at Tekniska skolan in Stockholm, and then the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She initially painted landscapes, portraits and botanical illustrations, but from 1906 she began creating large scale abstract artworks as part of her explorations of theosophy and spiritualism. Believing herself to be guided by a higher power when creating these radically abstract works, she did not exhibit them in her lifetime, and left instructions for them not to be shown until two decades after her death. She is now recognized as a pioneer in abstraction, predating the works of Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian.

• Product Code S22385