on af Klint in “Seeing is Believing” ~ Fee Briony, Author
At the turn of the 20th century, Hilma af Klint explored the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian…. and yet is little known.
At around this same time, Emma Kunz and Georgiana Houghton similarly completed large bodies of abstract work that they themselves referred to as Mediumistic. It is quite fun to watch their essayists hem and haw over that bad M-word.
For me, one of the most interesting books published to date about Hilma’s work is “Notes and Methods”. The pieces in this book aren’t finished pieces of art but samples from some of her stacks of workbooks where she channeled the pieces she would create as messages.
Her work is loaded with symbolism which she meticulously tracked in a ledger documenting the symbols of the complex language she received and relayed.
