Ever looked at a dandelion and thought it was trying to teach you something about willpower? Hilma af Klint did. Most people know her as the woman who basically invented abstract art before the men got all the credit, but if you look closer at her work, you'll find it's absolutely crawling with plants.
Not just any plants, though. We’re talking about "spiritual portraits" of flora that look more like blueprints for the soul than something you'd find in a gardening catalog.
Why Hilma af Klint Flowers Aren't Just Pretty Pictures
Hilma wasn't just some hobbyist painting daisies in her backyard. She was a classically trained powerhouse. She graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887. For years, she actually made her living as a conventional botanical illustrator. She knew exactly how a petal attached to a stem and how light hit a leaf.
But then things got weird. Or, depending on how you look at it, things got real.
By the time she started her most famous work, The Paintings for the Temple, she wasn't just looking at the physical flower anymore. She was trying to see through it. To her, a flower was a gateway. A physical manifestation of an "etheric" energy. Honestly, when you see her 1919-1920 Nature Studies portfolio—which MoMA recently made a huge deal of in their What Stands Behind the Flowers exhibition—you realize she was trying to map the invisible.
The Breakdown: Symbols You’ll See Everywhere
If you're staring at a Hilma af Klint piece and feel a bit lost, you aren't alone. She had a whole secret language.
📖 Related: Bates Nut Farm Woods Valley Road Valley Center CA: Why Everyone Still Goes After 100 Years
- The Rose: This was her "masculine" symbol. But it changes based on color. A red rose? That’s a self-absorbed entity. A white one? Unselfishness.
- The Lily: This was the "feminine" counterpart. It stood for spiritual perfection.
- The Lotus: Usually represents the "Word of God" or high spiritual birth.
- The Spiral: You’ll see these "snail" shapes coming out of flowers all the time. To Hilma, that was evolution. Life isn't a circle; it's a spiral moving upward.
She basically believed that plants were "nature spirits" that absorbed intellectual energies from the universe. Pretty heavy for a watercolor of a coltsfoot, right?
The 1919 Shift: When Flowers Got "Riktlinjer"
There’s this specific moment in 1918 when Hilma left Stockholm and moved to the island of Munsö. She started drawing flowers almost every single day. But she did something revolutionary. She would paint a perfectly realistic, delicate botanical drawing—like a sunflower or a wood anemone—and then, right next to it or underneath it, she’d draw a geometric diagram.
She called these diagrams riktlinjer, which is Swedish for "guidelines."
Basically, she was saying: "Here is what the eye sees (the flower), and here is the mathematical, spiritual truth of its soul (the diagram)."
Take the Tussilago farfara (Coltsfoot). In her notes from April 1919, she writes that this little yellow flower "wants to tell us what is required of a human being." She saw its strong roots as a sign of willpower. She even thought the way the petals were arranged showed the plant was "self-aware." It’s kinda wild to think about a weed having a social structure, but that’s how she saw the world.
👉 See also: Why T. Pepin’s Hospitality Centre Still Dominates the Tampa Event Scene
The "On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees" Series
By 1922, Hilma changed her style again. She stopped doing those tight, precise drawings and started using a "wet-on-wet" watercolor technique. If you’ve ever tried watercolor, you know this is where the paper is damp and the paint just... bleeds.
The results are these glowing, hazy, pulsating orbs of color.
In this series, a birch tree isn't a trunk with branches. It’s a red circle holding a purple circle with a dash of yellow in the middle. She was trying to capture the "aura" of the plant. At this point, she had moved past the need for "correct" anatomy. She wanted the vibration. This was influenced heavily by her interest in Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. Steiner told her that one should observe a plant until they could feel its quality as similar to a sunrise.
She took that literally.
What Most People Get Wrong About Her Work
A big misconception is that Hilma was "crazy" or just "channeling" spirits without any control. That’s a total myth. She was incredibly methodical. Her notebooks—thousands of pages of them—are filled with definitions, keys, and logical systems.
✨ Don't miss: Human DNA Found in Hot Dogs: What Really Happened and Why You Shouldn’t Panic
Another mistake? Thinking she hated the physical world.
She loved it. She just thought it was incomplete. Her flower paintings were an attempt to reconcile science (which she respected) with the spiritual (which she felt). She wasn't trying to replace the botanical textbook; she wanted to add a second volume that dealt with the soul.
Why This Matters Today
We’re living in a time where everyone is talking about "plant intelligence" and how trees communicate through fungal networks. Hilma was on this vibe over a hundred years ago. She saw the interconnectivity of all life before we had the fancy sensors to prove it.
If you want to experience Hilma af Klint flowers for yourself, there are a few things you can actually do:
- Check the 2026 Schedule: Major solo exhibitions are hitting the Grand Palais in Paris (May–August 2026) and the National Gallery of Ireland later in the year. If you're in Stockholm, the Moderna Museet almost always has her work on rotation.
- Look for the "Nature Studies" Facsimile: The Stolpe Publishing house released a massive multi-volume Catalogue Raisonné. Volume VI is entirely dedicated to her flowers and "On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees." It's pricey, but it's the gold standard.
- The "Hilma" Walk: If you're ever in Sweden, visit the island of Munsö. Walking through the same fields where she did her Nature Studies gives you a weirdly clear perspective on why she saw the world the way she did.
Next time you see a wildflower, don't just look at the color. Think about the "guideline" behind it. Hilma would probably tell you that the flower is looking back at you, wondering if you're ready to grow too.
To really get the full picture, you should look into her The Ten Largest series, specifically the "Adulthood" paintings. You'll see those same floral motifs—the lily, the rose, the almond shape (vesica piscis)—blown up to a massive scale, proving that for Hilma, a tiny flower and the entire universe were basically the same thing.