Spiral n.º 1

Context: Hilma writes everything down. Before facing her large canvases she fills whole notebooks classifying each symbol, as though she needed to compile an instruction manual in order to understand the world. On one of those pages, divided into yellow and blue bands, she repeats the same familiar form: the spiral, sign of evolution, of growth, of movement, of life.

Interpretation: we go straight to the origin, to where the artist feels her way into the gesture, explores it, repeats and adjusts it, like someone practising a signature over and over until it finally satisfies them. The result: two spirals of unequal size gravitating over a golden centre, deep blue on the outside, the same ground Hilma uses in her colour code to represent the feminine.

Technique: we were after the feeling of a sketch, of an unfinished work, taking from her private notebook the intimate gesture of someone who believes she is not being watched.

Source: Hilma af Klint, Notes and Methods, University of Chicago Press, 2018.