This is a little off topic but I stumbled onto an important artist that may change the history of Modern Art.
Hilma af Klint was a woman who created Modern Art before any of the male artists who have been attributed as the ‘founding fathers’ of modern art history. She was born in Sweden in 1862, never married and has a venerable body of work that pre-dates Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee and Twombly. Her work was never seriously shown and nothing was ever sold, nor will it ever. After her death she tasked her nephew to protect it and not to show any of it until 20 years after her death in 1944.
As was popular at the time, she was involved in the spiritual arts and was tasked by her ‘Angel’ to paint specific works, which she acknowledges as allowing her to understand our universe from the atom to the whole. She was painting during the flurry of scientific discoveries of our times. Her paintings were of light, x-rays and radio waves. Her extensive writings (25,000 pages in notebooks) give a hint of the bigger meaning but are not that of logical analysis but rather that of understanding experientially using the mind, body and soul.
A new documentary about her work is called “Beyond the Visible”. Included below is a short intro to her work. I encourage you to research more about her.
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