Collection: Hilma af Klint What Stands Behind the Flowers

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

May 11–Sep 27, 2025

In the spring and summer of 1919 and 1920, during a period of intense engagement with nature, artist Hilma af Klint drew flowers almost every day. “I will try,” she wrote, “to grasp the flowers of the earth.” This exhibition focuses on a recently discovered portfolio of drawings—jewel-toned watercolors made by a keen-eyed naturalist, attuned to the rhythms and bounty of the blooming season.

Breaking with traditional botanical art, af Klint juxtaposed her exquisitely rendered blossoms with precisely drawn diagrams: a blooming sunflower is echoed by nested circles; a marsh marigold is accompanied by mirrored spirals; a cluster of budding branches is set against checkerboards of dots and strokes. With this profusion of forms—an expansion of the abstract language for which she is best known—af Klint visualizes “what stands behind the flowers,” demonstrating her belief that careful observation of her surroundings reveals ineffable aspects of the human condition.

Af Klint imagined her portfolio as an atlas—or in botanical terms a flora—that details the plants of Sweden, where she lived and worked. Hers, however, is a flora of the spirit, a mapping of the natural world in spiritual terms that would stand alongside any scientific resource. Putting representation and abstraction, close looking and envisioning, art and botany into dialogue, af Klint’s drawings recognize the interconnectedness of all living things. “I have shown,” she wrote, “that there is a connection between the plant world and the world of the soul.”