Hilma af Klint: Painting the Invisible Before It Had a Name

When people say “the first abstract painter”, they name Kandinsky. But years before him, a woman in Stockholm was already painting enormous canvases with not a single object from the visible world on them — only spirals, circles, colour and geometry, and behind them one intent: to show the invisible. Her name was Hilma af Klint. And she is closer to me than most, because she did exactly what I do — she turned the canvas into an instrument for what cannot be touched.

She did not exhibit these works in her lifetime. She ordered them hidden for twenty years after her death — she believed the world was not yet ready to read them. The world, indeed, was not: recognition came a century later. I know that feeling — doing something whose name will be invented later.

What she saw

Hilma saw a simple, inconvenient thing: the spiritual cannot be painted “as it is”, because it has no appearance. You cannot copy it the way you copy an apple. But you can carry it across through a form tuned to it — through geometry, colour, rhythm. Her spiral is growth. The circle is wholeness. A pair of colours is a duality waiting to be joined. She built not pictures but diagrams of the invisible — a visual language for what religion describes in words and physics, so far, does not describe at all.

And she was certain that art is not a decoration for walls but a way of knowing, on equal footing with science and faith. The canvas, for her, was an instrument. Here I am with her entirely. When I put a portal, a figure and geometry onto a canvas, I am not “illustrating an idea” — I am assembling an instrument that holds a state outside of you, so that you can look at it.

Where her model is not complete for me

Hilma did not paint for the viewer. She painted for a future temple, for the world of spirits, at their dictation, as she believed — and hid what she made. Her canvas faced upward and forward, toward those who would come later. Toward me and you — last of all.

I am not correcting her: she had her own time and her own covenant with the invisible. There is no ideal model, and hers would not have become mine even if I agreed with every sign in it. My map simply faces the other way. I paint not for a temple and not from dictation — I paint for you, in a language you can read now, standing in front of the canvas. Hilma received form from above and guarded it as revelation. I build the form myself and hand it to you as a window, not as a dogma to be taken on faith. She trusted the invisible to guide her hand. I take responsibility for the hand myself — and I insist on that.

What this means for you

Honestly, with no promises: a painting will not open “secret knowledge” to you and will not cure anything in you. I do not trade in esoterica, and a spiral on canvas is not a spell.

But what Hilma touched, you have tested on yourself a hundred times without naming it. There are forms in front of which something in you straightens, and forms that make the room feel tight. Geometry acts on your state before you have time to think. The only question is whether the forms around you are accidental — or chosen. A good work on the wall is a form chosen for the person you want to catch yourself being.

And still

Hilma af Klint painted the invisible for forty years, knowing it would not be seen in her lifetime — and painted anyway. That faith that form matters more than recognition is a rare kind of courage.

Perhaps that is why her works lived long enough to meet their viewer instead of falling apart. The invisible is patient. Look at the wall in front of you: what forms hang on it — and what are they doing to you while you are not noticing? Hilma showed that this can be chosen. I only suggest you choose it consciously.

The work in question — “Abstraction” →

— Evgeny Fleysher