ABSTRACT
In the intra-action, the artist is acting in the context of a larger whole, which for Hilma af Klint is the cosmos, and always on the border of the material and the spiritual. The artist is in dialogue with the beyond visible, with nature, and matter. Hilma af Klint was a pre/early Swedish modernist with an abstract language prior to her time, while the two Danish contemporaries, Else Alfelt and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, were in the same circles of abstract and Surrealist artists in Copenhagen in the 1930s. If we take a further look at the importance of space and time in af Klint’s paintings, it gives us a better understanding of how these were originally created, in relation to each other, as assemblages. The first mountain-shaped figures became apparent in Alfelt’s paintings after 1934, but it was only in 1943 that she began to name these as mountains.
