A Stunning Visual Tribute to an Abstract Pioneer
Born in Sweden in the late 18th century, Hilma af Klint produced over 1,000 works over her 81-year life. Her body of work, which reflects the influences of early 20th-century spiritualism, religion, natural science, and technology, was produced with a highly systematic and planned approach, resulting in a staggeringly vast and sophisticated body of work. While her contemporaries, abstract painters like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, have earned renowned stature in art history, it has only been in recent years that her pioneering abstract expression and practice have begun to be showcased in museums.
Beginning with her solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013, her impact rippled across the globe, and her 2018-19 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York attracted approximately 600,000 visitors, the largest number in the museum's history. In Japan, the documentary film "The Visible: The World of Hilma af Klint" (directed by Halina Dirschka, 2019), which was announced for release in 2022 ahead of the release of the film, has quietly generated buzz, and a Japanese exhibition of her work has been eagerly anticipated. Now, a large-scale exhibition of her work is being held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (March 4–June 15).
This special feature, which coincides with the exhibition, explores the core of her thought and work through commentaries on her representative series, including "Paintings for the Temple," watercolors, and notebooks; a chronology tracing her life; essays on various aspects, including spiritualism, Swedish folk art, and gender and sexuality; and a special conversation between artist Kenjiro Okazaki, who was one of the earliest to speak of the importance of af Klint, and the exhibition's curator, Takehito Miwa. What can we learn from these works, which transcend the boundaries of "art history" and "abstract painting" and are like systematic diagrams intended to understand all kinds of physical phenomena, the creation and appearance of living organisms, and the structure of the universe and the natural world?
The artist interview introduces Wendelin van Oldenborgh, who has used video and installation art to approach dominant discourses and power structures such as feminism, gender, and colonialism. Curator Mio Harada spoke to the artist, who is currently holding his second solo exhibition in Japan, about the issues behind his work and his creative process.
