Altarpiece No. 3 (1915 CE)

A golden circle anchors the altarpiece painting with unusual certainty. Around it, the composition feels reduced, deliberate, and almost architectural, as though every form had been cleared away except those needed to express a final spiritual concentration. In this last altarpiece, Hilma af Klint brings her abstract language to one of its most distilled points, creating an image that suggests not movement through a process, but arrival at a state of unity and stillness.

The Final Painting in the Altarpiece Group

Painted in 1915, this work is the third and last of the three altarpieces within The Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint’s major spiritual project. These paintings were conceived as the culminating images of the larger cycle, intended to stand in the innermost part of an imagined sanctuary. By the time she made them, af Klint had already developed a highly coherent symbolic language through which geometry, color, and sequence could convey metaphysical ideas without relying on conventional religious imagery.

Designed for a Spiritual Destination

Af Klint gave considerable thought to how these works should be encountered. She numbered them according to the order in which she believed they should hang, emphasizing that the sequence itself formed part of the viewer’s spiritual journey. In her later sketches for a temple, she imagined a nearly circular building with ascending levels, culminating in a sanctuary where the altarpieces would be seen together. Within that vision, this final painting would have held a particularly important place, not simply as another image, but as part of the concluding focus of the entire structure.

Abstraction as Spiritual Language

The painting reflects af Klint’s engagement with Theosophy and related ideas about spiritual development. One important concept was that evolution moved in two directions: upward from the material to the spiritual and downward from the divine into the world of matter. Rather than illustrating this through figures or narrative, af Klint gives it abstract form. The composition becomes a field of symbolic relations, where shapes, alignment, and color are meant to suggest realities that cannot be directly seen.

This is one of the reasons the work is so significant within her oeuvre. It does not use abstraction to reject meaning, but to concentrate it. The painting is not less spiritual because it avoids traditional iconography. It is spiritual precisely because it seeks another visual language capable of holding transcendence, order, and inner transformation.

Gold, Scale, and Concentration

The painting is executed in oil and metal leaf on canvas and measures 237.5 × 178.5 cm (93.5 × 70.27 inches). Its central circular form, enriched with gold leaf, catches and reflects light, giving the image a shifting radiance that changes with the viewer’s position. This use of metal leaf was deliberate, reinforcing the work’s special status within the altarpiece group and adding to its sense of sacred presence. The large scale also matters: it allows the simplified composition to feel immersive rather than minimal.

Preserved in Stockholm

Today, Altarpiece No. 3 is held by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm. Together with the other altarpieces, it remains central to how her work is understood and exhibited. Seen within the context of the larger cycle, it stands as one of her clearest attempts to create an abstract art of spiritual culmination—an image meant not only to be looked at, but to be approached as a point of inward focus.