Julia Morison’s ode to Hilma af Klint
Do you remember seeing Hilma af Klint’s paintings at City Gallery? In 2022, the work of this Swedish artist spread out in an expansive solo show, and in the seismically fraught context of Pōneke’s half-deconstructed civic centre, af Klint’s paintings were bright and flourishing; vivid pinks, blues and oranges, and hovering, glowing orbs of gold.
Upstairs, you found ‘The Ten Largest’ – 10 massive paintings hung in a line across the back wall. Af Klint has a sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative visual language of planets and circles and spiralling flower forms, unfurling tendrils. She painted The Ten Largest over just 40 days in 1907, under the guidance of spirits, and they remained largely unseen and unknown until 1986.
Two years after af Klint’s show, her work, ideas and presence still hover in City Gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, on the other side of the world from where she lived and worked.
I felt her feminine energy a few months ago in Angela Lane’s exhibition, Phosphene, in the downstairs galleries. Lane’s tiny painted landscapes of celestial phenomenons chimed with af Klint’s visions of spiritual activity in the physical world.
In 2022, artist Julia Morison hadn’t heard of af Klint before a friend called her up to tell her about the exhibition in Wellington, and suggested that Morison fly from her home in Ōtautahi Christchurch to see the show.
“I thought, that’s quite a big ask, to fly up just to see a show!’ Morison says. But she did. And then she flew up two more times.
Morison says of the experience: “I’d found an artist who was trying to develop a spiritual, visual language, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Not like hers, not the same, but I’d found a grandmother.’’
The Ten Largest had a particular impact on Morison, who has been working in sets of 10s since the 1980s. She is interested in the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition, in particular a diagram called the Sephirothic tree which is structured into 10 nodes that symbolise different God-created attributes through which the universe is manifested.
Morison took the Sephirothic tree and spun it out, twisted it and reinterpreted it into a generative system of signs that respond to and commune with each other.
Her work Vademecum (interestingly, created in 1986, the year that af Klint was included in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 18901985 at the Los Angeles Museum of Art) was a collection of pages that can be pinned to a gallery wall in a range of different ways.
Morison created a series of 10 shapes that sit at the bottom of Vademecum, each of which is painted in one of 10 associated materials, such as blood, excrement, gold or lead.
In Morison’s current show, Ode to Hilma, now on at City Gallery, we find the 2022 series Vademecum II, an exquisite sequence of her original set of 10 logos that are recombined and reimagined into new forms.
To say that Morison has “returned” to this older work for her new show doesn’t feel right, as the structures and systems she explored in the 1980s weave their way throughout her practice in the decades that have followed – they are continuous and generative.
But seeing af Klint’s exhibition did ignite a kind of return for Morison; it prompted the 10 big works we see on the wall across from Vademecum II.
It’sashock,forboththeeyesandthebody, to walk up the stairs at City Gallery, turn left, and see those striking works on the high wall where af Klint’s paintings hung two years before. If Vademecum II is a busy chatter, then these works are a glorious oration.
Called Meditations, each work is associated with one of the 10 different symbolic elements that she began working with decades ago. “The whole work is a meditation on unification. The female and the male side don’t exist without the other, they aren’t opposites.”
Like af Klint, Morison experiments with a non-partisan visual system where opposites don’t contradict or antagonise, but account for each other’s existence, they patiently bear witness. This unified visual language was first proposed in the 1980s but reads with renewed potency in the context of 2024, where the deconstruction of binary understandings of gender gathers political and social momentum.
When I spoke to Morison in February, I kept thinking, too, of the recent Hui aa Motu called by Kiingi Tuheitia at Turangawaewae Marae where he called for kotahitanga (unity) between iwi Māori, and of similar movements across the globe generated in response to entrenched political partisanship.
Ode to Hilma is timely and relevant, and also shows the contemporary currency of af
Klint’s work – how she has inspired artists in Aotearoa and how her painted tendrils bear new fruit.