Culture
Discovering occult painter and mystic Hilma af Klint
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LONDON — The Serpentine Gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862 -1944). Over her career, af Klint painted nearly 1200 works, at least 200 of which were created during trance rituals and inspired by her esoteric beliefs. Af Klint’s paintings, which have only been exhibited a few times and in limited numbers since the 1980s, are regularly compared to other famous abstract painters of the era, including Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, and Piet Mondrian. Over the past decade, as af Klint’s work has become better known, art historians have been questioning whether it is af Klint, rather than Kandinsky, who is actually the true pioneer of abstract painting. As noted in BlouinArtInfo, “[af Klint] painted in near isolation from the European avant-garde, forging her own singular path motivated by her interest in nature, the spiritual realm, and the occult.”