David Zwirner presents Tree of Knowledge, an exhibition of a rare set of Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking 1913–1915 series of works on paper of the same title, on view at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York. This recently discovered group of eight watercolors is among the few works by the artist to exist outside of the holdings of the Hilma af Klint Foundation. This will be a singular opportunity for New York audiences to experience the artist’s revelatory work and follows the highly acclaimed 2018–2019 exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Though little known during her lifetime and for decades after, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) has come to be recognized as one of the most important and inventive artists of the twentieth century. When she began making vibrant, symbolic paintings as early as 1906, her work was radically unlike anything that had come before and preceded the abstract work of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich by several years.
In contrast to those artists, who were more broadly credited for inventing abstraction, af Klint was not directly engaged in any avant-garde circles or art movements, coming to abstraction through her own artistic and personal evolution and development. Af Klint studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm for five years starting in 1882, where she gained a reputation as an accomplished painter of naturalistic portraits and landscapes. As with many of her peers, af Klint was profoundly interested in spiritual movements and philosophies, including the then emergent teachings of Theosophy and Anthroposophy as well as Buddhism and Rosicrucianism, among others. She became actively involved in examining the mysteries of the supernatural world, and her interest in visualizing the invisible forces beyond the physical realm led her to explore and represent spiritualist ideas and sentiments in her art.
David Zwirner Books will be publishing a fully illustrated catalog supporting this body of work with a newly commissioned essay by celebrated af Klint scholar Julia Voss, whose comprehensively researched Hilma af Klint, a Biography is forthcoming from The University of Chicago Press in September 2022 (the bestselling German edition was published in 2020 by S. Fischer). David Zwirner Books will also publish The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, a graphic novel by Phillipp Deines with a foreword by Julia Voss that illustrates key moments in the artist’s life in 2022.
The show runs from November 3rd to December 18th. For further information on the exhibition visit the David Zwirner website
Image: Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge, No. 1, 1913–1915. Courtesy David Zwirner
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