The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5 Group 3 1907

Hilma af Klint made “The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5 Group 3” with oil paint, using these colours like she’s laying out a garden. The painting is not about one thing, it's about seeing what happens. Klint has got circles bumping up against other circles, these colours – yellows, blues, black and white – forming a kind of cosmic diagram. The colours are thinned, almost translucent in places, and build up a really complex surface. It's like a dreamscape, with forms that feel both familiar and totally alien. There’s this form near the bottom, like a sort of pale seed with two circles. I think of it as a point of origin, or potential. It reminds me a little of Kandinsky, but Klint’s got her own thing going on; a kind of intuitive geometry, that makes you think about the unseen forces that shape our world. It feels like an invitation to meditate on the mysteries of existence.