The Large Figure Paintings No. 5 (1907 CE)

The Large Figure Paintings No. 5 press forward against a restrained field of color, as if the painting were trying to give visible shape to forces that usually remain unseen. White, black, yellow, and blue are not used here simply for harmony or contrast; they work more like carriers of meaning, setting spiritual ideas into relation through geometry, balance, and tension. The result is a painting that feels both controlled and searching, poised between structure and revelation.

A Work from The Paintings for the Temple

Painted in 1907, this canvas belongs to Hilma af Klint’s larger project The Paintings for the Temple, created between 1906 and 1915. That cycle emerged during a period of intense spiritual investigation, when af Klint was working through questions of unity, duality, and the deeper order underlying visible life. According to her own account, the series was guided by spiritual beings she called the High Masters, who directed her toward themes such as atoms, plants, and religions in order to express the interconnectedness of all existence. The “temple” of the title was not meant as a literal building, but as a framework for spiritual growth and insight.

Painting as Transmission

Af Klint described the making of these works in striking terms. She wrote that the images were painted directly through her, without preparatory drawing and with great force, and that she often worked rapidly without changing a brushstroke. Whether understood literally, symbolically, or somewhere between the two, that description tells us something essential about how she saw her role. She did not approach these paintings as ordinary compositions alone, but as acts of reception, in which the artist served as a conduit for truths that arrived from beyond ordinary consciousness.

Geometry and Spiritual Order

This painting is important not only within af Klint’s own oeuvre, but within the wider history of abstract art. Long before abstraction became broadly recognized through artists such as Kandinsky or Mondrian, af Klint was already using non-representational form to think through spiritual ideas. Here, geometry is not a move away from meaning but a way of concentrating it. The shapes are deliberate, and the limited palette reinforces the sense that each element has a role within a larger symbolic order.

What emerges is not abstraction for its own sake, but a visual system in which form becomes a vehicle for metaphysical thought. That is one of the reasons the painting still feels so distinctive. It does not abandon significance in favor of formal innovation; it fuses the two.

Oil, Scale, and Deliberate Contrast

The painting is executed in oil on canvas and measures 150 × 118 cm (59 × 46.5 inches). Its size gives the forms a strong physical presence, while the controlled palette of white, black, yellow, and blue creates a focused visual field. The relationship between color and shape feels carefully calibrated, suggesting that each formal decision was meant to carry conceptual weight as well as visual impact.

Preserved in Stockholm

Hilma af Klint left behind a vast body of paintings, watercolors, and drawings, yet she chose not to make her abstract works widely public during her lifetime, convinced that their significance would not yet be understood. Today, this painting is held by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, where it remains part of the larger body of work through which her role in the development of abstraction continues to be reassessed.