The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood (1907)
This conversation is connected to The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood (1907).
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter who made abstract work beginning in 1906 — years before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich. She kept most of it private during her lifetime, stipulating that it not be shown until twenty years after her death. This composition is from her body of spiritual and diagrammatic paintings — floating orbs, looping lines, and softly glowing fields of lavender, cream, pale blue, and yellow. Af Klint trained as a conventional landscape and portrait painter at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, which makes the leap to this kind of work all the more striking.