The Dove, Nr. 12 1915

Hilma af Klint made "The Dove, Nr. 12" with oil and tempera, using a limited palette to evoke something beyond our everyday vision. The way the forms emerge from the paint tells me she’s thinking about process, how an image comes into being. The yellow background has this glowing quality, and then you've got this greyish white orb. I notice this little pop of red and orange right at the center, like a seed or a tiny sun. The texture looks like it was built up, layer by layer, almost like the earth itself. And that ring around the sphere, painted in this quiet lavender, pulls the whole composition together. There's a conversation happening here with artists like Kandinsky, who was also exploring abstraction and spirituality, but Klint has her own voice, one that hums with a different kind of energy. What I love about this work is that it doesn't give you all the answers; instead, it invites you to dream along with it.