Name: An Atom in the Universe
Start: 2006-02-17
End: 2006-04-16
Location: Camden Art Centre

Type

Exhibitions

Format

In the Building

Date 17 Feb/16 Apr 2006

Price Free entry

Supporters

The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm

Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944, Stockholm, Sweden) made paintings inspired by her lifelong obsessions with spiritualism and the occult.

Characterised by a flowing and graphic abstraction, her early paintings replicate the automatic drawings made during séances she held with a group of friends known as The Five. It was at these séances that she first met the spiritual leaders that stayed with her throughout her life, Gregor and Ananda. Although she was also a commercially successful portraits and landscapes painter, she embarked on a lifelong dedication to her ‘leaders’, making over one thousand paintings in secret which she insisted must not be shown to the public until 20 years after her death. Camden Art Centre presented the first solo exhibition of her paintings in the UK.

With her use of grids, geometry and flat applications of colour, Hilma af Klint seems to predate stylistically a ‘modern’ sense of abstraction though she never entirely gave up representing ‘things’. Made in series, they evoke primordial forces and themes of evolution giving form to both the transcendental and the physical, sensory world. Perhaps she knew she was ahead of her time and that her work would come to be better appreciated in the future, as certainly her drawings and paintings resonate with many artists working today.

A new publication to coincide with the exhibition was produced by Douglas Hyde Gallery and launched at Camden Art Centre.

All works courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm.

Images Related Events The Artist

Installation views of Hilma af Klint's exhibition 'An Atom in the Universe' at Camden Art Centre, 2006

Live Art Performance: Madame Arkwright's Salons

05 – 19 March, (2006)
Taking place over four evenings, Madame Arkwright’s Salons explored spiritualism and other issues that arose from the Hilma af Klint exhibition. Artists, writers and performers explored the relevance of the supernatural through a series of talks, slideshows, performances and screenings, with contemporary takes on coincidence, scientific marginalia, superstition and the invisible. Included in the performances were works by Peter Arnold, Margarita Gluzberg and Zoë Walker. Organised in collaboration with Sally O’Reilly.

Exhibition Talk: Gustaf af Klint

Thursday 16 February (2006)
A talk on the life and work of Hilma af Klint by Gustaf af Klint, from the Hilma af Klint Foundation.

Family day led by artist Serena Korda

Saturday 25 March (2006)
A workshop with artist Serena Korda exploring the exciting and freestyle form of automatic drawing.

The Artist

Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) was born in Karlberg, Sweden. She grew up in Stockholm, studying at what is now the School of Arts, Crafts and Design and the Academy of Fine Arts. Having demonstrated her gift as a medium in childhood, she became increasingly interested in spiritualism and the occult after the death of her sister in 1880, founding the séance group The Five — named after its five female members — in the 1890s. Already a well-established portrait and landscape painter, she began to produce automatic drawings and abstract, symbolist paintings from the early 1900s onwards, after receiving information from a spirit guide that she was to execute ‘paintings on the astral plane’. Hilma af Klint’s work was first shown to an international audience in the exhibition The Spiritual in Art — Abstract Painting 1890 – 1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then, her work has been seen in numerous exhibitions including Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, at the Drawing Center, New York (2005) and in a solo exhibition at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2004). An Atom in the Universe is her first solo exhibition in a public gallery in the UK.