Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Like many artists and writers and thinkers of her generation

  • Hilma af Klint was deeply interested in the idea

  • that there existed another layer of reality

  • that couldn't be directly perceived through the senses.

  • In 1896, she joined with four female friends

  • to form a spiritualist group that they called The Five.

  • Together the women conducted seances,

  • they studied esoteric texts,

  • and they also conducted experiments with

  • automatic drawing and automatic writing.

  • And in these works, they relinquished

  • conscious control over the movement of the pencil

  • over the sheet of paper.

  • So this represented quite a dramatic shift

  • from the academic training that Hilma af Klint had received

  • at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts,

  • and it also set the scene for the next very important phase of her practice,

  • 'The paintings for the temple'.

Like many artists and writers and thinkers of her generation

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it