TRUE ♾️ NATURE

"The Secret Paintings of Hilma af Klint" By John Saxby,  Editor, AGNSW "Look" magazine "The experiments I have undertaken,’ the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint wrote in 1906, ‘will astound humanity.’ Or, as Sue Cramer, curator of Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings , puts it:  ‘You’re entranced by the mystery of it all, and by the beauty of the works. I was amazed that they had been made so early last century. Their colours, abstract forms and symbols are just so extraordinary. And the scale of many of the paintings! The scope of af Klint’s vision is remarkable. That this was achieved so early and by a woman, when things were so restrictive for her gender. You just think, well, how could this be?’ Incredulity is a common response upon first learning of af Klint’s paintings, which are on display in an exhibition co-curated by the Art Gallery of NSW’s Nicholas Chambers. The astonishment only deepens when one learns about the nature of their creation and the artist...

Hilma af Klints Stored away and scarcely known for decades, the re-discovery of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s ‘secret paintings’ has taken the international art world by storm. Now her remarkable work is coming to Australia in the first survey of af Klint’s work to be shown in the Asia-Pacific region. Graduating with honours in 1887 from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, af Klint was recognised as a talented naturalistic painter but in 1906 chose to pursue a radically different path as an artist – one that was deeply engaged with spiritualism, with new developments in science and with the natural world. No one had created paintings like hers before – so monumental in scale, with such radiant colour combinations, enigmatic symbols and other-worldly shapes. In an era of limited creative freedom for women, her paintings became an outlet for her exceptional intelligence, spiritual quest and ground-breaking artistic vision. Believing that viewers of her time were not ready for what ...