An abstract painting by the pioneering Swedish artist Hilma af Klint will be sold at the Stockholm auction house Bukowskis on 19 November, with an estimate of SEK6m to SEK8m (around $600,000 to $800,000).
Ser III No. 5, which measures 38.5cm by 29cm, was bought by a private collector in 1995, when it was deaccessioned by the Hilma af Klint Foundation, and has remained in the same hands ever since.
The oil and graphite on canvas is dated January 1920, a time when af Klint’s was at her most productive, making 85 works in just a few months, a flurry of subtly different arrangements of triangles, circles, and rectangles punctuated with symbols and signs, including variations of the Theosophical Society’s seal. However, this spurt of hard-edged geometric abstraction came to an abrupt stop in March 1920 when af Klint took a break from painting to study Goethe’s colour theory before restarting in 1922 with looser, wet-in-wet watercolours inspired by anthroposophical artistic principles.
It is highly unusual for af Klint’s work to come to auction, as her foundation (established in 1972 by her nephew and heir, Erik af Klint) tightly controls the supply of her abstract paintings. Those that do come onto the open market tend to be earlier, more traditional landscape paintings, such as Vid ankdammen, a watercolour on paper of a mother and child watching ducks from 1910, which sold for £40,640 at Christie’s in March, far above the £6,000 to £8,000 estimate. Such a dearth of supply also means the record for af Klint’s work is relatively low, at $165,825 for The Power of the Spleen, a watercolour on paper from 1931, which sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk in 2019.
“The artist’s non-figurative legacy is preserved and administered by the Hilma af Klint Foundation, and her abstract paintings have consequently remained almost entirely beyond the reach of the public art market,” says Louise Wrede, the head of Bukowski’s art department, adding that only two abstract paintings (as opposed to works on paper) by af Klint have previously sold at auction, “both more than three decades ago.”
Inspired by natural sciences, spirituality and philosophy, af Klint (1862–1944) was an artist well before her time and her visionary abstracts were little appreciated in her lifetime. It was only in 1986, when some of her work (including this very painting, Ser III No. 5), was featured in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s show The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, which brought af Klint’s work to an international audience.
Since then her star has risen, and particularly sharply since 2018, when the Guggenheim Museum in New York held Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, a much-lauded show which became the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history with over 600,000 visitors. The public and institutional appetite for af Klint’s work show no sign of abating—the first major retrospective of her work in France took place at the Grand Palais in Paris over the summer, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple (1906–1915), and just last week, the National Gallery of Ireland opened Hilma af Klint: Artist and Visionary, which runs until 7 February 2027.
