CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/29/2020

Symbols are like doors to other dimensions in 'Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium'

“No. 9, Old Age” (1907)—from Hilma af Klint’s iconic Ten Largest series—is reproduced from Artist, Researcher, Medium, the newest publication on Sweden’s pioneering cosmonaut of inner space. Published to accompany a major exhibition that has finally opened to the public after months of corona-related delays at Malmö’s esteemed Moderna Museet, this volume investigates the ways that af Klint linked her painting to a higher consciousness. “In order to liberate oneself from prevailing truths and opinions, one has to dare to leave safe ground,” curator Iris Müller-Westermann writes. “Time and again throughout her life af Klint was prepared to take that risk. Although she kept copious notes in which she tried to put what she experienced into context, it is the images that constitute the essential message that she has left behind. They are powerful, remarkable, radical images. At first glance, many of them seem very simple, but in interaction with each other they reveal their complexity. It would be pointless to directly translate the symbols and letters that appear in af Klint’s work into verbal meaning. They always have to be seen in relation to the whole. Symbols are like doors to other dimensions. Hilma af Klint’s fascinating images that generate such a great deal of interest today, one hundred years after their creation, invite us to go on a journey into another dimension—an inward journey, which is simultaneously also a journey outwards, beyond.”