She had a penchant for the occult – a “commission” from a spirit at a seance inspired her to create her most striking paintings. Since the late nineteenth century, an array of spiritualist teachings had been revolutionizing religious understanding the world over.

Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a non-representational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The project of Hilma af Klint and her female colleagues was the result of great maturity, of confidence and collective efforts, performed both in work and in life.While her naturalistic landscapes and botanicals were shown during her lifetime, her body of radical, abstract works never received the same attention. Now, for the first time, af Klint’s works, some 1,600 in all, have been collected in a Catalogue Raisonné.

The resulting feat of detective work pieces together life and art, visions and the visionary; the person Af Klint was and the friendships that shaped and strengthened her. This title represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began painting her abstract and highly symbolic images as early as 1906, long before Kandinsky and Malevich arrived at what has generally been regarded as the birth of modern abstract art.A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The experiments I have undertaken,” she wrote as she set off on this new path, “will astound humanity. Long underrecognized, af Klint is amid a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm. Essays by leading historians of theosophy and a quantum physicist, among others, provide enlightening insight into a world in which both the visualisation of atoms and spiritual séances alike became artistic material - a world that fascinates us even more than ever.

They amount to cosmic sonograms of unseen forces in Klint’s very large, iridescently colored canvases with their biomorphic shapes, auras, algae blooms of color, arabesque jellyfish tentacles coiling, geometric configurations, all to — as she put it — 'awaken humanity' to unseen astral-transcendental otherness. The implications of these works are not only gargantuan, but also infinitely pleasurable to look at.A wild ride [that] pulls readers into the story making them yearn to discover more about this spiritual, artistic young woman… A welcome and riveting tale of an often overlooked artist, interesting enough to engage any age, from elementary to high school. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Thus she catapulted her life’s work into the future, out of the first half of the twentieth century into the second, safe from the judgment of her contemporaries. In 1986, more than forty years after her death, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an exhibition titled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, which offered a new perspective on the his­tory of nonrepresentational art.