Temples for paintings / Tracey Bashkoff -- Art for another future: learning from Hilma af Klint / moderated by Helen Molesworth -- The traveling Hilma af Klint / Julia Voss

Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862 and went on to study at the city's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honors in 1887. She soon established herself as a respected painter in Stockholm, exhibiting deftly rendered figurative paintings and serving briefly as secretary of the Society for Swedish Women Artists. During these years, she also became deeply involved in spiritualism and theosophy. These modes of spiritual engagement, which were also of keen interest to other artists, including Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Malevich, and Mondrian, were widely popular across Europe and the United States, as people sought to reconcile long-held religious beliefs with scientific advances and a new awareness of the global plurality of religions. Af Klint's first major group of largely nonobjective work, The Paintings for the Temple, grew directly out of those belief systems. Produced between 1906 and 1915, the paintings were generated in part through af Klint?s spiritualist practice as a medium and reflect an effort to articulate mystical views of reality. Stylistically, they are strikingly diverse, incorporating both biomorphic and geometric forms, expansive and intimate scales, and maximalist and reductivist approaches to composition and color. She imagined installing these works in a spiral temple, though this plan never came to fruition. In the years after she completed The Paintings for the Temple, af Klint continued to push the bounds of her new abstract vocabulary, as she experimented with form, theme, and seriality, creating some of her most incisive work. Exhibition: Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (12.10.2018-27.01.2019)