I’m a person who walks looking down, because you can find a lot of things on the ground. I’m basically a recycler. I find other people’s stuff and junk and recycle it into my stuff and junk. — BetyeSaar
The rediscovery of the work that Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began in 1906—an amalgam of abstraction, surrealism, and figuration—has necessitated a rewriting of the history of abstract art in the West, displacing Wassily Kandinsky as the self-appointed originator of the genre.
Af Klint, a well-educated member of Sweden’s aristocracy, was an adherent to spiritualism, theosophy, and anthroposophy. Coinciding with the scientific revelations of the early twentieth century—radiation, theories of relativity and quantum physics, the discovery of electromagnetic waves—her revolutionary art gave form to the invisible.
Thirty-five years after af Klint’s inclusion in the 1986 LACMA exhibition The Spiritual inArt: Abstract Painting 1890–1985—and seven years after the landmark Moderna Museet retrospective Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction rocked the art world—Halina Dryschka’s essential documentary BEYOND THE VISIBLE—HILMA AF KLINT is here to stream.
Participants include Moderna Museet director and curator Iris Müller Westermann, af Klint biographer Julia Voss, Swedish art historians Anna Maria Bernitz and Eva-Lena Bengtsson, and family members Ulla, Johan, and Elisabet af Klint.
Here was a woman who consequently followed her own path in life that led to a unique oeuvre. A strong character and, despite all restrictions, Hilma af Klint explored the possibilities that go beyond the visible. She knew that she was doing something important not only for herself but for many people. It is more than time to tell the untold heroine stories. And there are many of them. This is one.
This is a film about a truly successful life. A woman who was not dependent of the opinion of others and kept on going her very unique way of living and working. Dedicated to things that matter in everybody’s life: How do we want to live? How do we achieve a truly content and fulfilled life? And is that what we see real or do we just think it is real?
Hilma af Klint’s oeuvre goes even beyond art because she was looking for the whole picture of life. And with that she comes close to the one question: What are we doing here? — Halina Dryschka
The most interesting thing for me now is to make sure that the planet is going in the right direction. I keep the words sky, water, earth, fire in my mind. Those are the elements, and that’s what my work has come to be about. That’s what I’m about… When I think about my painting and the political and the planet, it’s about the hope that it’s not too late and that people can still get together and in whatever small way make a difference that adds up. As far as physical strength and ability goes, I’m very weak, of course, because of my age, but I still can paint, I can still draw. And so that’s my contribution…
I enjoy life, and I feel I’ve been different people. I was a different person, for example, when I did these very sexy drawings and paintings of my body, looking at my body. [Laughs] It’s the truth. Sex was all I could think about…
When I used to go to my house in Taos, New Mexico, and go to watch tribal dances, they wouldn’t ask me if I was Indian; they would say, “What tribe are you?” I would say, “Venezuelan.’”And they’d say, “I’ve never heard of that one!”… Within myself, I felt that I was Indian. I felt that very much when I went to the dances, because the tribes had a complete attitude towards the earth, that it was alive. I remember asking why the dances in the winter were different from the summer dances. A lot of stomping went on in the summer. I asked a man about this once, and he said, “Because the earth is asleep, of course, in winter.” Instead of stomping, they drag the foot, so as not to wake the earth. It’s an attitude toward the planet as a living thing. — LuchitaHurtado*
Frieze Los Angeles brings Hans Ulrich Obrist to the city for a conversation with Hurtado, who worked with the curator on her retrospective I LIVE I DIE I WILL BE REBORN—which opens at LACMA on February 16..
The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer King, associate curator of Contemporary Projects at LACMA.
John Baldessari’s art is cheerfully laconic. It strikes this special tone, broadcast as if on its own frequency, from its beginnings until the present day. Is there a method to it? And, if so, what does it consist of? The simpler answer points to an ever-surprising change in perspective that Baldessari offers his viewers. A slightly shifted view of art, the world, and its image…
But there is more: a daring intellectual feat in his approach, precisely because it includes acting stupid. Baldessari assumes a calculated risk that he will not be understood fully, but with the aim of deriving intellectual profit from that. — Bice Curiger*
*Bice Curiger, “Doubly Detached, Doubly Immersed,” in John Baldessari: Pure Beauty (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009).
John Baldessari was born in National City, California, in 1931 and died on January 2, 2020 at home in Venice Beach.
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