Details
The image
Symmetrical forms arranged around a vertical axis, drawn with fine lines and filled with pale colour. Shapes repeat and mirror one another, so the sheet reads as a diagram rather than a scene. There is no horizon and no perspective, only relation.
Where it comes from
Hilma af Klint painted large abstract series in the first decades of the twentieth century, before the artists usually credited with inventing abstraction had reached the same ground and she kept most of them out of sight. Her working notebooks treat geometry as a language for something that cannot be depicted directly, which is why the pictures look closer to charts than to paintings.
On the wall
It asks for light and for quiet: a study, a bedroom, a reading corner. Because the lines are fine and the palette pale, it needs a wall that is not too dark and it rewards standing close rather than looking from across the room. In a group it should sit at the centre as the most delicate piece.
In company
Pairs well with Scandinavian furniture and other works on paper and it looks best in a light frame with a wide mount. Avoid hanging it beside very saturated prints, the subtlety disappears entirely. It is also the kind of picture that changes as the light moves through the day. Hung beside another piece from the Hilma Af Klint collection, it reads as part of a series rather than a single picture.
