17 March to 11 April 2020
Opening: Tuesday, 17 March 2020, 6p.m.
Grisebach shows works by Hilma af Klint and spiritual drawings from her surroundings
Stockholm, November 1906: Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is 44 years old when she turns her life upside down. She turns away from the academic painting in which she was trained and begins to work abstractly – in ever larger formats. In the following months she creates numerous series, including the cycle “The Ten Greatest”, whose paintings measure more than three meters in height. Kandinsky’s, Malevich’s, or Mondrian’s experiments with non-representational painting were still a long way off when Hilma af Klint wrote in her notebook: “The attempts I have made [...] will astonish mankind”. Her prediction came true in 2018, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opened a major retrospective of her work: The show attracted more than 600,000 visitors and became the most successful exhibition in the museum’s history.
Grisebach is pleased to present Julia Voss’ biography “Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen: Hilma af Klint, Leben und Werk” (S. Fischer Verlag) a selection of works by the Swedish painter, together with drawings and documents from the Monica von Rosen/EWF Private Archive.
For the first time in Germany, the only surviving self-portrait that Hilma af Klint painted of herself is being shown: In the undated painting, the artist presents herself against a blue background, wearing a long white robe. This painting is supplemented by ten other works by the painter that have never been shown in public before: hand-coloured photographs that reproduce the series “The Ten Greatest” in miniature format. Hilma af Klint probably edited these photographs in the early 1920s, when she was striving to make her work, which she herself described as “groundbreaking”, accessible to a wider public. Subsequently, she had all 193 works taken between 1906 and 1915 photographed. In a second step, she coloured these photographs or reproduced them in additional watercolours and glued them into bound albums. With this life’s work en miniature, she created a “museum in a suitcase” with which she travelled to Dornach, Amsterdam and London.
At the same time, the exhibition takes a look at the history and surroundings of Hilma af Klint’s work: She took part in her first seances at the age of seventeen. Among the sponsors of the young Hilma af Klint was Bertha Valerius (1824-1895), a painter and photographer who held spiritual sessions as a medium in Stockholm. As a young artist Hilma af Klint was part of the social circle of Huldine Beamish (1836-1892), whose guests included the writer August Strindberg.
The old orders were suspended during these séances: the living meet the dead, women become men and vice versa, past and future are pushed into the present, and the styles of drawing with pencil on paper explode.
The exhibition opening and book presentation with a conversation between Daniel Birnbaum and Julia Voss will take place on 17 March 2020 at 6p.m. at Fasanenstrasse 25.
The exhibition was curated by Julia Voss and Anna Ballestrem.