Our exhibition visitors may remember the solo exhibition with Hilma af Klint in 1998 in Södertälje konsthall. Twelve years earlier, her work had attracted international attention in the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was then completely unknown and her abstract work was shown for the first time 42 years after her death. Hilma af Klint has today been named the Mother of Abstract Art and the four male abstract pioneers: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Franticek Kupka.

From a young age, Eva Lange has worked with the sculpture’s form and expression. She has been working for 48 years and has completed a large number of exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. She also has extensive experience of teaching sculpture. Since 1998, she has been a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. Her search for the perfection of form has gone from discovering the expressions of other cultures to finding her own expression by exploring nature. Eva Lange’s hallmarks are large volumes with shapes of, among other things, the tulip, poppy and stalk made of white plaster. In her creation of form, light plays an important role. It sharpens the whiteness of the sculpture’s surface and deepens the shadow: from the brightest days to the darkest shadow.

In the exhibition, two worlds of form meet with different artistic starting points:

In five paintings from the suite The Swan and in the entire Eros series, with eight works, we get an insight into Hilma af Klint’s esoteric world. According to the artist, high masters on the astral plane wanted to communicate with humanity through her.

Eva Lange shows us sculptures that are rooted in the botanical world of form and sculptures where the human body is a source of form, for example in the series Örat (The ear). We also get to get acquainted with new works such as Anello Grande from 2011 with a universal form.

Paintings with messages of spiritual wholeness and sculptures with sensations of earthly forms – are united in space in a common light.

I would like to extend a very warm thank you to the artist Eva Lange who generously shared her time and with her humor she has gilded the moments in our work. A very warm thank to the Hilma af Klints Verk Foundation and especially to Ulf Wagner who with his commitment has been important for the creation of the exhibition. Thanks!

Maarit Nilsson Polet, Curator / art educator
Curator of the exhibition Hilma af Klint and Eva Lange.