NFTs launched on Pharrell Williams’ Goda platform are the latest digital offerings of abstract artists’ work

More than a century after she completed her chef d’oeuvre—193 abstract canvases known collectively as Paintings for the temple (1906-15)—Hilma af Klint has emerged this year as a multimedia power player. Her work – graphic, colorful and deeply idiosyncratic – has demonstrated a Van Gogh-like power to generate footfall and has spawned projects across multiple formats, from books and films to virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) experiences. .

Now, as of November 14, digital versions of all 193 of her Paintings for the temple, created by Acute Art, will be offered as single-issue NFTs, for sale on Goda (Gallery of Digital Assets), the platform launched earlier this year by multi-Grammy Award-winning philanthropist and recording artist Pharrell Williams. A second edition of the NFTs will remain with Bokförlaget Stolpe, the publishers of the Af Klint catalog raisonée. The originals belong to the non-profit Hilma af Klint Foundation in Sweden.

“Hilma af Klint was an incredible pioneer!” says Pharrell Williams. “It took us a century to fully understand. Now that we do, we must rewrite art history! Beautiful and meaningful art truly transcends time, and Hilma af Klint’s work is a perfect example of that. We are honored to show her work on this platform and truly celebrate a remarkable woman.” For KAWS, who serves as an art advisor on the Goda platform, Af Klint was a visionary. “I think it’s great that she’s finally getting the attention she deserves,” says KAWS. “During her lifetime, the public wasn’t ready, but in today we are. She painted for the future. She painted for us!”

The surge in demand for Hilma experiences brings back memories of the 2018 survey of her paintings at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that broke attendance records for the institution, saw 100,000 copies of the catalog shipped worldwide and sold out the exhibition’s artist merchandise.

Af Klint, the mysterious Swedish mother of early-modern abstraction whose seminal work remained unknown in her lifetime, was featured in a series of launches over the past month: a new biography; the seventh and final volume of her catalog raisonné; a VR experience, Hilma af Klint: The temple; and a biography, Hilmawhich opened in UK cinemas in October.

Af Klint – who dabbled in spiritualism and automatic drawing in a group of women artists from Stockholm called the Five – followed Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher of spiritual science, and mystic Madame Blavatsky into the fashionable, well-funded Theosophical movement. She demonstrated a theosophist’s concern for geometric and spiral forms in the mass of diagrammatic ones temple images that she worked on after being asked at a seance in 1906 by a “High Master” to abandon her academic approach to art.

The new NFT editions and The temple The VR piece was created by London-based Extended Reality (XR) studio Acute Art, and so does an AR app, Hilma af Klint Walk. Both the VR and AR pieces were showcased last month at top art fairs: Frieze London and Paris+ par Art Basel. The VR work is a “dream project” for Daniel Birnbaum, the artistic director of Acute Art, who curated Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen at the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2016 while he was director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

“Hilma af Klint dreamed of a spiral building large enough to display her most important work, the overwhelmingly beautiful Paintings for the temple,” says Birnbaum. “Acute Art has created digital versions of the 193 works to be acquired as NFTs. As a result, the temple will be owned by people all over the world.” The NFT project opens up a digital market for her work for the first time.

Hilma in virtual reality

Beautifully framed and paced by Rodrigo Marques, Acute Art’s creative technologist, with an ambient soundtrack by Andrew Sheriff, the VR work takes the viewer on a dreamlike flight through Af Klint’s corkscrew spirals and latticework, up and down Guggenheim-like ramps where the artist’s brilliantly colored paintings materializes and animates; and over a sunflower-filled island, based on a real one between Copenhagen and Malmö, where the artist once hoped to build a temple.

In December, the VR experience will be presented on the giant ultra-high resolution screens at the newly opened Outernet arts venue in central London. The presentation of The temple follows other festival-standard VR pieces by contemporary artists such as Simon Denny and Marco Brambilla, offered for free to generate traffic from walk-in audiences.

Birnbaum is also co-editor, together with Kurt Almqvist, of the Af Klint catalog raisonné, published by Stolpe. He says that he and the team at Stolpe see the VR piece as the “eighth volume” in their monumental catalog of 1,500 works. The NFT venture is a further expansion of Stolpe’s catalogue, of which the publisher retains the second NFT edition temple paintings.

The new movie Hilma, directed by Lasse Hallström, is a lyrically framed family affair, with the older Hilma played by his wife Lena Olin and the younger Hilma by her daughter Tora Hallström. In it, the Af Klint family’s interest in mathematics, botany and nature in general is emphasized, as is the sisterhood in Stockholm – devoted to spiritualism, art and women’s rights – where Af Klint thrived.

With so much new Hilma content, where do you start? Birnbaum says that the shell-like, spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum in 2018 proved to be ideal for Af Klint’s paintings. (The museum’s founding curator, Hilla von Rebay, who worked closely with Frank Lloyd Wright on its design, was another theosophist.) But he argues that VR, with its capacity to display multiple works in ever-evolving digital temples, is the medium that Af Klint’s work has been long overdue.

• Hilma Af Klint: The Temple, Outernet, 138 Charing Cross Road, London, every Sunday December 11-5. February 2023