In the manner of Hilma af Klint
Swedish, 1862–1944
Primordial Chaos, Sequenced, 2026
Tempera and oil on paper and canvas
300 × 240 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.12.2
← The Ten Largest, No. 11: Notifications Altarpiece for the Cloud →
A rope of pale blue and pink twists up the middle of the picture from a lotus at the bottom to a flower at the top, and it is hard not to read it as a double helix. On either side, flowers and discs repeat like the letters of a code. Af Klint was painting the spiral as the path of life in 1907. Watson and Crick were forty-six years behind her.
The brief
A twisting double spiral of pale blue and pink petals ascending a cream ground, small dots and letters along its length. Early twentieth-century spiritual abstraction, large diagrammatic compositions of spirals, concentric circles, petals and snail shells in pale pink, egg yellow, sky blue and lilac on a cream ground, delicate line work with small lettering-like marks, symmetrical mystical schemas, tempera flatness with visible pencil underdrawing. Museum photograph of the painting on canvas, flat even lighting, no frame, no text, no wall, no floor, cropped to the canvas edge.
Written to the house rules. The painter's name does not appear.
Take it home
The painting on this room's wall, at its own proportions, nothing written on it.
