The Seven-Pointed Star (1908)

Gallery 207

Writing about The Seven-Pointed Star group, Hilma af Klint said that her spiritual guides had instructed her to paint three sets of seven paintings at seven-day intervals. Beyond those directions, she was able to freely exercise her creativity. Here, her use of lines recalls her automatic drawings, although it is more controlled. With their gracefully simplified forms and colors, these works anticipate some key aspects of Modernist abstraction that would more fully emerge in the following decade. However, af Klint was never solely focused on issues of forms.

In her production, she incorporated numerous references with many different meanings. The seven-pointed star—which lends its name to the title of these paintings and the series to which they belong, along with the Evolution group—is a symbol in different religious and occult traditions. In Christianity, it represents the seven days of Creation; in kabbalistic Judaism, it embodies the seventh sphere of the Tree of Life; in Islam, it alludes to the first seven verses of the Quran; in alchemy, it refers to the seven known planets in the solar system; and it is associated with divine perfection as well as with many other sacred meanings in both ancient and contemporary beliefs. Theosophy condensed all these ideas into the concept of the seven rays, which were later called “the seven principles of Nature.”