Hilma af Klint, one of the pioneers of abstract painting, was born in Sweden in 1862. She studied for five years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and after completing her studies, she worked as a professional painter, which was quite rare for a woman during that period. Hilma painted her first abstract work in 1906, much earlier than artists now widely known as abstract artists such as Kandinsky or Mondrian.
She wished for her paintings to be revealed only twenty years after her death in 1944. It was only in 1986 that her abstract paintings were presented to the general public for the first time in the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 in Los Angeles. Her first major retrospective later took place at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013, followed by the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2018, and from then on her work became much more widely known to the public.
Personally, I first encountered her name much later, during her exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2024. Interestingly, this was before I had even launched my project, the Mellow Schema Tarot deck. From time to time, people who had seen the Mellow Schema tarot artworks mentioned that it reminded them of Hilma af Klint, and that was how I first came to know about her work. Maybe it is just a personal coincidence, but I still feel there was something strangely linked between me and her work.
At the time, I looked through her works and immediately thought they were incredible. While her exhibition was being held in Bilbao, I seriously considered trying to travel there somehow, but in the end I could not make the trip. As time passed, I launched the Mellow Schema Tarot deck and continued dedicating myself to its journey. Then I discovered that a Hilma af Klint exhibition would be held at the Grand Palais in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, and I was genuinely so happy. I found out that the Grand Palais offers nocturne exhibition hours every Friday until 10 PM, so I decided to go later in the evening and enjoy a calm art night surrounded by her paintings, and so it was.
The exhibition was divided across two floors. The space was set with pastel sky blue, black, and pink walls that reminds of the palette tones in her work. There were many texts and archival materials throughout the exhibition, which were very helpful in understanding both her life and her art. Not only did they deepen my understanding of her work, but many specific stories were also especially fascinating, such as the story of the group called The Five, formed together with four other women. These women met regularly to communicate with spiritual guides. Below is a text I found online:
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.” This is how Hilma af Klint describes the creation of her central oeuvre, her Paintings for the Temple. The temple to which the title refers does not necessarily relate to an actual building but can rather be seen as a metaphor for spiritual evolution. ("Topics and central works". Moderna Museet Stockholm. modernamuseet.se)
Through both this group and her artistic practice, Hilma af Klint sought to express inner and outer worlds through a visual language. She left behind an enormous number of sketches and notebooks, and many of them resemble the notes of a scientist as much as those of an abstract artist.
As a brief aside, these kinds of sketches of hers reminded me of my own old sketchbooks from my preparatory art school days when I was around twenty years old. At that time, I was deeply interested in forms and geometric structures as artistic expression. I always chose grid paper (quadrillé) because it made drawing geometric figures easier for me, and it felt like the right place to put my “figures,” or my drawings, so to speak. I remember that for my entrance exam to Beaux Arts de Lyon, the fine art school in Lyon, I even created my own XXL Rhodia style notebook, inspired by the famous French orange covered notepads, using large orange paper and drawing my geometric forms across giant grid pages that I made myself. I carried this gigantic Rhodia notebook rolled up almost like a carpet on my back to the interview day at Beaux Arts de Lyon and showed it to the jury professors. I still vividly remember the slightly surprised expressions on their faces, even now, more than fifteen years later.
While walking through the exhibition, I was surprised to find a copy of the book Thought Forms on display. Coincidentally, I had discovered this book only a few weeks earlier, completely unrelated to Hilma af Klint. It is a book about how music, emotions, experiences, and colours affect thought forms, and I found the subject fascinating. I immediately ordered a copy and have been waiting for it to arrive, so before even receiving the book, it felt strangely exciting to encounter it again here. It made me realize how strongly I have recently been drawn toward these kinds of ideas.
At the corner where Thought Forms was displayed, the exhibition explained it this way:
Hilma af Klint approached colour through two different but complementary angles. One, scientific, considered the laws of optics and the physics of light, and was largely shaped by the many colour theories, particularly those of Goethe, Chevreul and Rood, that were part of a nineteenth-century artist's training. The other, spiritual, borrowed from theosophical currents and focused on the psychological effects of colour. In Thought-Forms (1905), Annie Besant, and Charles Leadbeater, both prominent figures of the English Theosophical Society, describe emotions in terms of colour: red is the colour of desire, yellow that of intellectual concentration, and blue the colour of spiritual contemplation. In The Changing World (1911), a theosophical treatise that af Klint had read, Besant evokes the pioneering role of artists: "...) there are already signs, in the world. of painters more especially, of new powers which are opening, new splendour of colour, and new wedding of emotion to colour." (text from the exhibition Grand Palais)
Overall, the exhibition was deeply moving and beautiful. Among all the exhibitions I have seen in recent years, this was one of the most memorable and personally inspiring experiences for me.
At the end of the exhibition, I purchased both the Grand Palais edition journal and the accompanying book published for the exhibition. Now I have even more things to read and discover. I will probably visit once more before the exhibition ends in August, to spend more time with her works and experience that energy again.
Information of the Exhibition
Grand Palais, Paris
17 avenue du Général Eisenhower
75008 Paris
Entrée Square Jean Perrin
6 May – 30 August 2026
10h – 19h30
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday
8 May – 30 August 2026
10h – 22h
Every Friday