Hilma was a professional painter trained at Stockholm Academy of the Arts, and came from Sweden. She made a living selling portraits, but in her free time, she created work that she her self could not understand. So, she started to write a diary of her ''guided processes'', aiming to map up what the meaning of these beautifully forceful pieces was.
Some of her work was very big in diameter, and her most prominent work series is called Paintings for the Temple. The piece here is called the Altarpiece Number 1, from 1907.
Interestingly enough, these artists were given space and presented together in a retrospective exhibition in 2019. under the title World Recievers (with work of a third painter called Georgiana Houghton). The event took place in Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Amelia Groom writes about this exhibition saying: ...“World Receivers” puts Kunz in the company of Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, two women who also developed abstract visual languages as part of their personal esoteric investigations—af Klint in Sweden in the first decades of the twentieth century, Houghton in England in the second half of the nineteenth. x
Interestingly, even though it seems that these artist had a same process of creation, i would dare say that this is not the case, and the reason why we could see things as so is because thay both had a non-religious spiritual practice that was interwoven into their creation.
Hilma was a professional painter. As she painted the paintings for the temple, she was in search of meaning. The temple was an external place, and the spirits , she believed guided her. She was a vessel for otherworldly insight, and that insight was in her but also away.
On the other hand, the paintings bt Emma Kunz were a by-product of sorts to her question searching, spiritual journeys. She never considered herself a painter. Rather, her work was a part of her healing and spiritual work, and a tool on that path. She never saw her creation as detached from herself, but as aid, as a mechanism.
However, what unites them both is that they, in the way they work, propose an alternative modus to receive insight. And Emma more consciously so than Hilma, see themselves as a part of a whole, that is in dialogue with the divine or the spiritual, that is it in its action, in effect.
As for Emma, most of her work she created using a pendulum, as a means to gain insight. She was not trained as a painter, and her work was done with pencil on small grid paper.
She was a healer first and foremost. Her paintings, like the one seen here, are also quite sizable in diameter. They are rhythmical, and seemingly symmetrical. She said that: ''Everything happens according to a certain regularity which I sense inside me and which never lets me rest.''1
As we see, even though the spiritual is approached differently with the works previously mentioned, we still should realize that these were more-or-less conscientious, creative processes that dealt with this topic.
What we will now look into is something other, yet using non-representation as well. We will look at the work of two artists that claimed that the spiritual created trough them - Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz.
They come from different places, and have different stories.