'Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint' At The Parrish

Oftentimes, visionary artists don’t get their due in their lifetimes. Van Gogh is the archetypal example, but this effect is especially pronounced for women artists, who are often not taken seriously, or overshadowed by male contemporaries — or sometimes choose to wait until history will look at their work with a kinder eye.

On March 18, to celebrate Women’s History Month, the Parrish Art Museum in partnership with Hamptons Doc Fest will be hosting a screening and talk about one such artist: Hilma af Klint.

Swedish artist Hilma af Klint lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Also a mystic, heavily concerned with spiritualism and theosophy, af Klint began working in abstraction before the term was even created — predating Kandinsky and Mondrian. Her spiritual work as a medium, sometimes through seances, influenced her artwork, which often contains geometrical forms, bright colors, and bold shapes.

The film, “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” was directed by Halina Dryschka and came out in 2019. Diving into af Klint’s life and craft, it’s the first and only documentary on the artist.

“I felt like this was a timely film about a woman who was ahead of her time,” Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects at the Parrish, Corinne Erni said. “Not only ahead of her time, but [also] she was into spiritualism, mysticism, but also geometry and abstract paintings before it was coined as such.”

“I think we live in a time where people are looking to spiritualism with what happened with COVID, so I think there is a link to her work and to the times that we live in,” Erni added.

In her lifetime, af Klint kept her artwork to herself. She stipulated that her groundbreaking paintings were not to be shown until 20 years after her death. Her work only really began to be seen in the 1980s, and her first major solo exhibition took place in 2018, at the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim’s retrospective rediscovered and celebrated her paintings, shown for the first time to a mass audience.

“She showed her work very little,” Erni explained. “She didn’t want to show her work because she felt like she would not be understood. And I think that’s probably true for a lot of women artists who have worked alongside male artists, but were never seen with the same importance or weight during their lifetime, or only later in life would get recognition… I think that’s the typical story of women or women artists, that they’re not taken as seriously as men are.”

The Parrish screening will be followed by a talk with Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, the founders of the feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost. The two Brooklyn-based artists founded the collective in 2020, which seeks to cultivate a worldwide network of women, nonbinary, and trans artists and draw on the spiritual and artistic legacy of af Klint, especially Klint’s intermarriage of art and the spiritual. Erni had known Tegeder and Ray independently then saw their Abstract Futures Tarot deck exhibited at the Armory Show.

“I was just struck by their beauty,” Erni said. “It’s kind of unusual that two artists will work together over such a long time, I think it took them 300 hours to make all of these tarot cards… And so I reached out to them and said, well, would you want to do a talk after the film?”

Ray and Tegeder are both multidisciplinary artists whose work draws from spirituality.

“They recently did an exhibition at the Elizabeth Foundation called Cosmic Geometries,” Erni explained. “The entire approach was very much based on chance, but also they used the tarot cards to decide where the works would go and which works would be next to each other. It was a beautiful exhibition, a very, very thoughtful approach, and they had an image of Hilma with a candle in the corner.”

To Erni, Hilma’s Ghost is the kind of art we need now.

“I think it’s really the kind of care and attention and thoughtfulness that we need in our time,” Erni said. “That collaborative spirit, I was really taken by it. I’m happy to see contemporary artists, women artists, who also address queerness and feminism to talk about their influence of Hilma’s work and life.”

As women artists, and individuals in all disciplines, are celebrated this month, it’s important to remember that looking back paves the way to look forward, and inspire new generations of women to create.

The film and talk take place Friday, March 18, at 6 p.m. The talk will also be livestreamed. The Parrish Art Museum is located at 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill. Visit parrishart.org for details.