Hilma af Klint painted for spirits — and century later, world is finally looking

Hilma af Klint's "The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, Group IV" (1907) / Courtesy of Hilma af Klint Foundation

BUSAN — The origin of modern abstraction has long rested on a handful of towering names: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich. Men whose legacies are etched into museum walls and art history textbooks, whose breakthroughs are hailed as the beginning of it all.

But some revolutions bloom in silence. And they wait for history to catch up — even if it takes a century.

Several years before Kandinsky painted what he would call “the world’s first-ever abstract picture” in 1911, a Swedish woman named Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was already conjuring ellipses and spirals floating across vibrant fields of color — works that broke free from the visible world and the rules of representational art.

Unlike her celebrated male counterparts, however, the swirling cosmologies she began painting in 1906 went virtually unseen.

With no audience and no precedent, af Klint worked with only one conviction: that her art was meant for a time beyond her own. In her will, she requested the pieces not be shown until 20 years after her death. But the world still wasn’t ready and those two decades quietly stretched into many more.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that a few exhibitions began to introduce a fraction of her oeuvre to the public. But her truly seismic and long overdue arrival only came in the 21st century. The artist’s 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, for instance, drew over 600,000 visitors, marking the highest attendance in the museum’s 80-year history.

A view of Hilma af Klint's "The Ten Largest" series (1907) at "Proper Summons," her first retrospective in Korea staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

This summer, 139 paintings, drawings and archival materials that broke new ground have finally landed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (MOCA Busan) for af Klint’s first-ever retrospective in Korea. The exhibition is a traveling show and follows its stop at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

The Busan iteration, brought forth by the museum’s curator Choi Sang-ho under the title “Proper Summons,” unfolds more like a free-flowing journey through the once-obscure painter’s inner inquiries and spiritual reflections.

Born into an aristocratic Swedish family, af Klint received formal training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. To support herself, she devoted her early career to conventional genres of landscapes and portraits that bear little trace of the visionary work to come.

Hilma af Klint's "Study, Horse's Head" (1900-01) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Some of her illustrations from this period — delicate botanical watercolors and drawings of horse anatomy — are more revelatory, however, hinting at her deeper fascination with what lies beneath the immediately visible world.

That desire to see beyond the surface would soon crystallize in two seemingly opposing interests: science and mysticism.

At the turn of the 20th century, breakthroughs like X-rays, genetics, radio waves and subatomic particles offered tantalizing evidence that there were dimensions of reality existing beyond what the naked eye could perceive.

Af Klint sought to access those realms not through scientific experimentation, but through spiritual practice. From her teenage years, she immersed herself in religious and occult writings, eventually becoming drawn to the esoteric religious movement of Theosophy.

Installation view of Hilma af Klint's "Primordial Chaos" series (1906-07) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

In 1896, she formed “The Five” with four other artist-mystic women. Together, they conducted seances and produced automatic drawings, all in an effort to channel messages from beyond. Over time, they began communicating with spirit guides they named the “High Masters.”

Then, in 1904, af Klint received a directive that surpassed anything before it in terms of scale and ambition: She was to build a spiritual temple and fill it with paintings.

Hilma af Klint's "Altarpiece, No. 1, Group X, Altarpieces" (1915) / Courtesy of Hilma af Klint Foundation

This “commission” from the High Masters launched her into a decade-long odyssey, culminating in “The Paintings for the Temple” — a vast body of 193 works divided into different thematic series, including what is now recognized as the first modern abstract painting in Western art.

And yet, interestingly, she didn’t claim full authorship over this groundbreaking art. “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force,” she wrote in her journal. She saw herself less as a sole creator than as a spiritual medium, a conduit for higher forces.

The bulk of the Busan exhibition is devoted to these series. Swirling symmetries, radiant orbs and indecipherable symbols appear suspended on canvas. Among the featured are “Primordial Chaos,” “Eros,” “Evolution,” “Tree of Knowledge,” “The Swan” and “Altarpieces.”

Installation view of Hilma af Klint's "The Swan" series (1914-15) / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

But without a doubt, the magnum opus is “The Ten Largest” — the towering series that drew awe and acclaim at the Guggenheim show.

These 10 monumental works from 1907 each stretch over 3 meters in height, charting the human life cycle from childhood and youth to adulthood and old age. Their vast surfaces pulse with biomorphic shapes, letters and bursts of luminous pastel. The images feel at once embryonic and cosmic, like spirit and matter caught mid-transformation.

The result is a rapturous visual symphony that has the power to entrance anyone who comes close.

The exhibition doesn’t merely summon a forgotten name from the past. It reintroduces af Klint as a voice for our time, still capable of stirring wonder, awe and something unnameable within us.

“The silence she left behind now becomes the beginning of a new conversation,” curator Choi said. “Her art has journeyed across a century to speak to us today. Its long silence now ended — may we share its stories together.”

“Proper Summons” runs through Oct. 26 at the MOCA Busan.