The Erotic Ecology of Hilma af Klint
“Firstly I shall try to understand the flowers of the earth, shall take as my starting point the plants of the world…”
The world of Hilma af Klint borders dimensions, you feel your feet are small enough to stand on the centre of a blooming flower’s stigma, or large enough to step over wild meadows. It is an inward looking gaze that searches for meaning through visual perception, through relationships to the natural world built in precise form and vivid, dancing colour. In her work, abstraction reflects reality more precisely than what is observable on the physical surface. Her images emerge through an openness of feeling, of the deep potential for meaning in the cyclical nature of life. Similar to how a flower absorbs light then produces colour and form, af Klint absorbed life and transformed it into a visual language completely her own.
In Andreas Weber’s book, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, he describes a philosophy of being in the world as primarily an erotic encounter, where meaning is derived through contact, and this contact transforms both sides of any given relationship. The work of Hilma af Klint can be interpreted through the lens of erotic ecology, in particular The Ten Largest (1907) series, where she traces the stages of life from childhood to old age. These gigantic paintings have a botanical, life-giving force. The abstract forms and swirling colours collide and transform, growing and dying before your eyes. They are full of mysterious diagrams that somehow perfectly articulate the layered complexity of the natural world. Flower circles dance through these works, bubbles and strings move fluidly through one another, child-like and boisterous, then grow older, where a slower breath fills the space between lines. Hilma af Klint said in reference to her series in 1917, ‘My mission, if it succeeds, is of great significance to humankind. For I am able to describe the path of the soul from the beginning of the spectacle of life to its end’. The path of life and death, repeated and embraced.
The Ten Largest, Childhood and Youth, 1907, exhibited in Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life at Tate Modern, 2023.
Weber describes how the acceptance of our own mortality is essential to experiencing true aliveness, that we are only able to desire life precisely because we will one day die.
‘In order for desire to be able to unfold in a body as a creative, deeply vulnerable gesture, it must already carry its negation within itself. It must be an urge that knows of its own impending end and is thereby free to pursue the hazards of growth and attachment, and to risk itself in the process’ (Weber, p56).
This reflects a deep knowing present in Hilma af Klint’s series, the exploration of our inward aliveness, our desire for knowledge and sensation, as well as our biological mortality, the fundamental cycle of life. Round shapes reoccur as a visual motif in The Ten Largest, converging and intersecting, flower circles dancing with one another, filled with other shapes, threads piercing through their borders. It is the swirling of things, the beginning and the end colliding in a single form, the balance and tension of time in a single shape. The paintings which depict childhood and youth are particularly full of round shapes, perhaps signifying new moments of cellular division, bodies bouncing back, unburdened by a heavy past. As time passes into adulthood and old age, more space appears between the shapes. Shapes open up with complexity and perhaps uncertainty, they reflect a more intellectual articulation of time. But they have a knowing, a past that asserts itself in balance, in tension, in learning from experience and building precise forms to face suffering and keep transforming in order to survive. The repeated deaths have created more complex forms, they have dented the circles, and the flowers are aware of their transient blooms.
The Ten Largest, Adulthood, 1907, exhibited in Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life at Tate Modern, 2023.
A profound relationship to flowers flows through Af Klint’s work, these life affirming images reflect our intimate connection to the natural world, not as something we observe, but as something we are made of. The exhibition Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life at Tate Modern describes Af Klint’s interest in flowers as ‘a means to articulate correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm - the idea that the structure of the cosmos is mirrored in the smallest living entity’. Andreas Weber mirrors this belief in our erotic connection with nature, ‘I am the grain of the field that died for me, and I die constantly and transform myself into what the plants inhale, such that my body becomes their new bodies’ (Weber, p57). I feel my body reflected in The Ten Largest, I look at my childhood as planting seeds in grass, my youth with unopened buds anticipating the future, my adulthood where I am learning to appreciate the sensation of smelling and caressing fully bloomed flowers because I know they will not last, and being with the inevitable wilting end. Flowers are so beautiful precisely because they are fleeting. The incredible majesty of such a complex structure, which may only bloom pristinely for a couple of days. Each delicate moment is precious, and each wilted flower is a reminder.
The Ten Largest, Adulthood, 1907, exhibited in Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life at Tate Modern, 2023.
Walking through a room filled with The Ten Largest, these spectacular images of colour and form that swallow you when you stand in front of them, imprint a moving reminder of the inevitable passing of time. I found myself reading the titles and positioning my own age, body, and experiences in relation to the work, where do I fall within these markers of time, which image am I? I became aware of what was behind me, what colours I had lost, the playful blue shades of childhood, the vibrant oranges of youth. I fell within violet, a quieter, more introspective tonal range. I thought of the colours to come, the pale, rosy end. Despite being confronted with this poignant reminder of the inevitability of death, there is no nihilism in the work of Hilma af Klint. On the contrary, it is a reminder of the beauty of existence, of the incredible opportunity for life. Andreas Weber reflects this, ‘the terms of life indicate that we should try to be as alive as possible and in so doing recognize deeply that we are altogether mortal. Indeed, that in order to become more alive, we must die over and over’ (Weber, p75).
Weber, Andreas. Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.
