Paris exhibition celebrates the visionary world of Hilma af Klint, an artist ahead of her time
Several years before Mondrian and Kandinsky were believed to have pioneered visual abstraction, a young Swedish woman named Hilma af Klint produced a series of strikingly original artworks that were way ahead of their time. Long hidden away from the world in a secret vault, her major work, the “Paintings for the Temple”, is now on display in France for the first time at a groundbreaking exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais.
Issued on: 05/05/2026 - 17:23Modified: 05/05/2026 - 17:27
8 min Reading time Share By: Charlotte WILKINS
In the autumn of 1907, a reclusive Swedish artist unfurled a vast roll of paper on her studio floor and began to paint.
She worked freely, and boldly, as the paintings swiftly took shape under her hand.
Gently swirling spirals, seashells and circles set against a vivid, vibrant orange; curling lines and loops cascade alongside floral shapes in soft pinks and startling blues; at times the organic forms and geometric shapes seem to float across the canvas.
She worked so quickly that the paint appears to run around the edges of some of them. Others still bear traces of her footprints. The luminous, mysterious paintings almost seem to glow.
The towering series of paintings, “The Ten Largest” created by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) form part of her vast and visionary abstract artwork, "Paintings for the Temple" (1906-1915) – now on display at Paris’s Grand Palais for the first time.
For several years before the men regarded as the founding fathers of abstraction – Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich – produced their artworks, Af Klint created a wildly original series of paintings that remain extraordinarily striking in both their freshness and scale today.
‘Unbelievable, magisterial’
“This incredible body of work has no equivalent,” said Pascal Rousseau, the exhibition’s curator.
“Coming face to face with ‘The Ten Largest’ is still an incredible sight to behold, even today,” Rousseau said, adding that he believed it was a major work of the 20th century.
“It is unbelievable, magisterial … even Kandinsky didn’t work on this scale.”
Rousseau, who first discovered Af Klint through the groundbreaking 1986 Los Angeles exhibition, "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985", has been pushing for her work to be shown in Paris since 2013.
“But Paris wasn’t yet ready to do so,” he said, delighted at last to be introducing the French public to Af Klint, whose work has never been displayed on anything like this scale in France.
There was little about Af Klint’s childhood to suggest she would go on to become such a trailblazer.
Born in 1862 into a Lutheran, aristocratic family outside Stockholm, she spent idyllic summers on the island of Adelso in Lake Malaren, developing a strong relationship to nature which would go on to inspire much of her work.
Her father taught navigation and astronomy to naval cadets and her grandfather was a cartographer who mapped the many islands of the Swedish archipelago.
At 20, she won a place at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (the Swedish academy began accepting women artists in 1864 but they were deemed only capable of copying – or minor arts such as needlework or tapestry – rather than creating any original art in their own right).
Art shaped by unseen forces
She became a skilled figurative artist in the formal tradition of her time and began to exhibit her more conventional landscapes.
But she also began making drawings shaped by unseen forces.
From an early age she was drawn to science and spirituality, the esoteric and the arcane.
As a teenager she joined a mediumship circle to deepen her connection to the spirit world – an interest that became all the keener after the sudden death of her sister Hermina at the age of 10 in 1880.
In 1896 she began meeting with “The Fem”, a group of four other female friends, who shared her deepening interest in spirituality and art.
At first a couple of them – but not Af Klint – made automatic drawings, becoming receptive to their guides, who they called the “higher masters”, by entering into a light trance and allowing their hands to move freely over the page.
They considered their drawings to be part of a collective, simply signing them “D.F.” for “De Fem” (The Five).
Then in 1903, Af Klint herself began drawing with graphite and coloured pencils before receiving the commission in January 1906 from her guide Amaliel to begin work on the “Paintings for the Temple”.
For one of the series, she made no preparatory sketches and the pictures simply poured onto the page.
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke,” she wrote in her notebooks.
‘Paradisaically beautiful paintings’
For the series, the “Ten Largest”, her guides gave her precise instructions.
They asked her to create “ten paradisaically beautiful paintings” that would give the world a glimpse of the four stages of life: Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, and Old Age. They told her to paint them in 40 days and what size the paintings were to be (they measure a monumental 3.28 x 2.40 metres).
She painted with egg tempera – known for its fast drying and luminous quality – and therefore ideally suited to the urgency of the painting – a technique used mainly by religious painters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
This “allowed her to work quickly, but also to intensify the pigments without using any varnish”, said Rousseau.
“The light comes from within. That was her intention. The painting itself reveals its own spirituality, in a way. So it is a technique tailored to the urgency of the creation, but one that also allows for enormous freedom in the act of execution.”
Each of the “Paintings for the Temple” are laid out in a clear, logical sequence. In a global first, eight of the 10 series of paintings are now on display in Paris.
Some of them are highly structured with neatly ordered geometric shapes and symbols while others feel more fluid, with organic forms unfolding or floating across the surface. There are mysterious, hybrid creatures – a woman is grafted onto a swan’s body – ; in others it’s almost as if she’s observing the inner life of plants.
The sequence of paintings looks like maps of unseen worlds, where colour, shape and form are freely blended as she invites the viewer into a contemplative cosmic harmony and a deeper interconnectedness of all things.
Paintings for the future
But Af Klint always knew that recognition of her work would be a long time coming.
For though she was able to exhibit her more conventional figurative paintings – small, post-Impressionist landscapes – when she tried to show her more radical, spiritual works, she met with resistance.
In 1932, she prophesied that the world, steeped as it was in materialism, capitalism and formal academic tradition, simply wasn’t yet ready for her work.
When she died in 1944, she left her many paintings and notebooks to her nephew Eric, having insisted they should only be shown at least 20 years later. The paintings were hidden away in a secret vault, where they were miraculously well preserved.
In 1970, her great nephew, Johan af Klint, offered to give her entire collection to Sweden’s leading Modern Art Museum, the Moderna Museet, but the donation was refused.
It was only in 1986, some 42 years after her death in 1944, when they were shown to an international audience in Maurice Tuchman’s landmark exhibition in Los Angeles, that her work first caught the world’s attention.
Retrospectives then followed in Stockholm and in Berlin. In 2018, the Guggenheim’s show of her work, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the future”, drew hundreds of thousands of visitors.
For though her paintings were well ahead of their time, her work also remains incredibly relevant today, said Rousseau.
“Eco-spirituality, women’s work, the collective, the question of gender fluidity that she embodied in her works, but also in her own life – these are all subjects that today, in fact, put her in tune with, I would say, the current affairs of contemporary society.
“She holds a very, very unique and particular appeal even for young artists,” he said, adding that that the “Paintings for the Temple” were finished in 1915, a year into World War One – pointing out the connection with the many global conflicts today.
This exhibition not only shows how she can engage seamlessly with Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, said Rousseau and be integrated with striking modernity and freshness into the grand narrative of modern art: it also shows that her prophecy has now come true.
“I think Hilma’s rehabilitation today really does coincide with the era she was waiting for, in fact. Even if it is a very difficult time,” he said.
He hopes that the exhibition will encourage visitors to seek out a deeper relationship with nature, that it will inspire more collaboration and greater interconnectedness with all things.
It is a wish that Af Klint, who described her mysterious paintings as “the one great task I carried out in my life”, would surely be proud of.
“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple” opens on May 6 at Paris’s Grand Palais.
