I was thinking while walking to the Guggenheim that my tastes in art have become very defined - movements, styles, individual artists, even types of colours, motifs and so on. Having experienced a concentrated dose of af Klint's work, I wouldn't say she's exactly a category-breaker, but I did enjoy it a lot, and she does exist somewhat outside of my familiar frames.
I think I first encountered her fairly recently, at the 'Museum of Everything' exhibition at MONA, but it turns out she was a successful part of the art establishment in the early part of her year, before following a path into spiritualism which coincided with her beginning to produce a range of striking and sometimes remarkable paintings in the terrain of abstraction separately from and before the recognised canonical figures began blazing their own trails.
Part of her method was to paint in series, seemingly often around a dozen or twenty works, the pieces leading to each other in powerful ways. The Swan (1915), in particular, is amazing, and cumulatively quite intensely moving. From the exhibition notes: "the swan symbolizes the union of opposites necessary for the creation of the philosopher's stone ... after the forces embodied by the swans come into conflict and begin to combine - a process signaled by the shift from representational to abstract imagery - they ascend into higher realms, until they are ultimately unified."
I think I first encountered her fairly recently, at the 'Museum of Everything' exhibition at MONA, but it turns out she was a successful part of the art establishment in the early part of her year, before following a path into spiritualism which coincided with her beginning to produce a range of striking and sometimes remarkable paintings in the terrain of abstraction separately from and before the recognised canonical figures began blazing their own trails.
Part of her method was to paint in series, seemingly often around a dozen or twenty works, the pieces leading to each other in powerful ways. The Swan (1915), in particular, is amazing, and cumulatively quite intensely moving. From the exhibition notes: "the swan symbolizes the union of opposites necessary for the creation of the philosopher's stone ... after the forces embodied by the swans come into conflict and begin to combine - a process signaled by the shift from representational to abstract imagery - they ascend into higher realms, until they are ultimately unified."
