Painting the Invisible: Hilma af Klint’s Vision of Art and Science

I just installed new art work in my office that is inspired by Hilma af Klint, an artist whose extraordinary paintings seem especially at home in a scientific environment.

Born in Sweden in 1862, af Klint was one of the earliest pioneers of abstract art. In 1906—years before artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian began making the works for which they became famous—she was already creating enormous, radically abstract paintings filled with spirals, circles, botanical forms, geometric structures, and vivid fields of color.

What draws me most strongly to af Klint is that she approached art with something remarkably close to a scientific imagination. She was deeply interested in botany, mathematics, evolution, and the scientific discoveries transforming the world around her. Her paintings evoke dividing cells, chromosomes, embryos, atoms, planetary systems, and molecular structures. Forms expand, replicate, intersect, and transform. Looking at them, one has the sense of witnessing an invisible biological process unfolding.

Af Klint came of age during a period when science was revealing entirely new layers of reality. X-rays made it possible to see inside the human body. Microscopy exposed hidden cellular worlds. Electromagnetism demonstrated that powerful forces could exist beyond the reach of the senses. The atom, once imagined as the smallest indivisible unit of matter, was itself becoming a complex internal universe.

Her art responded to this changing conception of nature. She was not simply painting what the eye could see; she was trying to represent the organizing principles beneath the visible world. In this sense, her paintings share a fundamental ambition with science: to find a language for things that are real but cannot yet be directly observed.

Her process was also strikingly systematic. Af Klint produced paintings in carefully organized series, developed a vocabulary of recurring symbols, and filled notebooks with diagrams, annotations, and attempts to interpret her own discoveries. Her studio became something between an artist’s workshop and a laboratory—a place in which ideas could be tested through color, scale, geometry, and repetition.

Yet her worldview cannot be separated from spirituality. Af Klint believed that her paintings were communicating realities beyond ordinary perception. To modern eyes, her combination of scientific curiosity and mysticism may appear contradictory. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the boundaries between science, philosophy, and spiritual inquiry were far less fixed. Each offered a different means of approaching the same profound question: What lies behind the world we can see?

Perhaps the most remarkable expression of af Klint’s vision was her relationship to the future. She understood that the work she was making did not belong comfortably to her own time. In 1932, she marked many of her notebooks with instructions that they should remain unopened until twenty years after her death. She died in 1944, but her abstract paintings did not receive meaningful public recognition until decades later; they were first shown to a broad audience in 1986. Today, she is recognized as one of the most radical and prescient artists of the modern era.

There is something profoundly moving about creating work for an audience that does not yet exist. Science often demands a similar kind of faith: the willingness to follow evidence or an idea before others can fully see where it leads. The most transformative discoveries frequently begin as observations that do not fit the prevailing view of the world.

This is why Hilma af Klint’s art feels so meaningful in my office. Her paintings remind me that both art and science begin with imagination—the ability to perceive a hidden possibility and then give it form. They remind us to look beyond what is already known, to remain open to worlds that are not yet visible, and sometimes to trust that the future will understand what the present cannot.