Spiral n.º 1

Throughout her more than one thousand works of art and thirteen thousand pages of notebooks, Hilma captures a unique language of colors, structures, symbols, and sacred beings capable of uniting the visible and the invisible and representing the vibrations and forces that make up the truth of the world, even if we cannot see them. Synonymous with change and progress, evolution and growth, the spiral is probably the most significant of these. The artist explores the gesture, repeats it, probes and adjusts it as many times as necessary until she feels completely satisfied.

And that is exactly what we do with this earring, in which two spirals of unequal size gravitate around a golden center, deep blue on the outside, like the background Af Klint uses in her color code to invoke the feminine. The sense of a sketch, of an unfinished work, is deliberate, usurping from her private diaries the intimate gesture of someone who believes they are not being watched.

You will find it in the book Notes and Methods, University of Chicago Press, 2018.