Hilma af Klint: Artist and Visionary

The first major af Klint exhibition in Ireland, made with the Hilma af Klint Foundation: The Swan and the Altarpieces alongside plant studies, portraits and landscapes not previously exhibited. Rooms 6-10.

Hilma af Klint painted large abstract works from 1906, years before Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian produced the pictures on which the standard account of abstraction rests. Almost nobody saw them. Her major spiritual work remained essentially unknown until the 1980s, and the received chronology of European abstraction was written without her in it.

This is the first major exhibition devoted to her in Ireland, made in partnership with the Hilma af Klint Foundation, which holds the bulk of the work. It runs in Rooms 6 to 10 of the National Gallery from 15 October 2026 to 7 February 2027, curated by Janet McLean, the gallery's Curator of Modern Art.

Af Klint's work was shaped by her involvement in Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, and she described parts of it as made under direction rather than invented. That account sits awkwardly with a modernist art history built on individual authorship and formal problem-solving, and it is a substantial reason the work was left out of the canon for so long rather than merely overlooked.

The gallery's framing does not treat this as an embarrassment to be managed. Its stated subject is the time, place and circumstances that shaped her - a painter working from nature, science and religion at once, trying to make sense of a modern world in which x-rays, evolution and the atom were all newly visible or newly argued. Read that way the spiritual sources are not a curiosity attached to the paintings; they are the intellectual apparatus she used, and they belong in the same sentence as the science.

What this exhibition adds to the now-familiar af Klint story is range. Alongside the abstract series it shows plant studies, portraits and landscapes, including work not previously exhibited. Af Klint trained conventionally and worked as a naturalistic painter and draughtsman throughout; showing that alongside The Swan is the argument that the abstraction came out of sustained observation rather than in spite of it.

The named works at the centre are The Swan, painted 1914 to 1915, and the Altarpieces of 1915, including Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece. These are late works in her abstract programme and they are large - the Altarpieces were conceived for a spiral temple building that was never constructed, which means they were designed for an architecture that does not exist and have to be shown in rooms that were never intended for them.

The Swan series works through a single motif toward pure geometry, pairing black and white swans that resolve into divided fields of colour. It is the sequence most often used to demonstrate that she arrived at non-representational painting by a route of her own, one running through symbolism and diagram rather than through Cubism.

The gallery's permanent collection is free every day, without booking, as it always is. This exhibition is ticketed, and the published range is EUR 0 to EUR 16. The gallery had not yet published the full band structure for this show when we checked. Its comparable current exhibition charges EUR 16 for an adult, EUR 12 for over-65s and jobseekers, EUR 8 for students and for visitors with a disability, with a carer admitted free and under-18s free when accompanied and booked - a reasonable guide to what to expect, but not a quoted price for this exhibition, and we do not present it as one.

The show is supported by Key Capital at 25 and by Ireland's EU Council Presidency Culture Programme for 2026, which places it inside a national cultural programme rather than in the gallery's ordinary run of exhibitions.

The exhibition was named in advance among the shows of the year in Ireland and is being treated as a significant booking for Dublin, but it has not opened and no assessment of the hang itself exists.