Long underrecognized, af Klint is amid a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm. One of the many praiseworthy things about Julia Voss’s excellent new biography of her is that it does not even entertain the thought. The final volume in a Catalogue Raisonné of the abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint, one of the first to be compiled for a Swedish artist, is released on October 31. Publishers: Breakdown Press, British Library, Dedalus Press, New Directions, Nieves, NYRB, Penguin Press, Twisted Spoon Press, Wakefield Press. Artist Philipp Deines traces the story of now world-famous af Klint’s unique life and groundbreaking oeuvre through five chapters featuring her development as an artist, her family background, and her relationship to the spiritual.

Up until the beginning of the century, she painted mainly landscapes and detailed botanical studies. She wrote and illustrated the book Kids Yoga, which was long-listed for the CILIP Carnegie Medal in 2018.At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian.

In 1986, more than forty years after her death, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an exhibition titled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, which offered a new perspective on the his­tory of nonrepresentational art.Her books include On Abstract Art (1997), The Infinite Line (2004), Eva Hesse: Studiowork (2009) and Gabriel Orozco: thinking in circles (2013). For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Af Klint’s paintings will be exhibited at Tate Modern next April, but it’s taken a long time for the art world to catch up with the visionary Swede. This volume, the third in the artist’s first seven-part catalogue raisonné, contains the sketches and preparatory work af Klint made in anticipation of The Paintings for the Temple. Biography, art history, and contemporary narrative style merge and complement each other in this magnificent visual world.

Voss suggests Af Klint was a pioneer of abstract painting, a label that fits in some ways – her work certainly isn’t representational in the normal sense – but jars in others. Af Klint set about composing for posterity an alluring eye-music that echoed back the complex psyche of her age.The Guggenheim Museum offers a revisionary chapter about the start of modern abstraction in its current headliner, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” introducing works that this Swedish artist and mystic made in 1906-7.