Hilma af Klint

In 1896 Hilma af Klint joined with four female friends – Anna Cassel, Sigrid Hedman, and sisters Mathilda Nilsson and Cornelia Cederberg – to form a spiritualist group they named The Five. The group met regularly to communicate with spiritual beings through prayer, séances and meditation.

The Five produced numerous automatic drawings and texts by relinquishing conscious control over the act of making. Their marks were ‘guided’ or ‘received’, resulting in unplanned, expressionistic and often completely abstract drawings. Through such practices, af Klint was able to free herself from the constraints of her formal training and discover a way of making art that pushed beyond the surfaces of the material world. This period of radical experimentation laid the groundwork for her most important body of work, The paintings for the temple 1906–15.