art HILMA AF KLINT the invisible, the spiritual, the occult text and selection of artworks by HANS ULRICH OBRIST all artworks copyright and courtesy of HILMA AF KLINT FOUNDATION photos MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was not self-taught, nor does she come from an alternative field of healing like Emma Kunz. She was classically trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. In the 1880s, af Klint founded a group of female artists called The Five, and collectively they conducted seances with the spirits who communicated with them through images. Their experiments in automatism predated the Surrealists by many years. Klint was trained as an artist and became a spiritualist. As she put it: “The pictures were painted directly through me without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict. Nevertheless, I worked swiftly…