Primordial Chaos No. 2 (1906 CE)

Nothing in this painting of primordial chaos feels fully settled. Forms coil, divide, and push outward as if the world were still in the act of becoming, and color seems to carry forces rather than appearances. What emerges is not a picture of chaos as confusion, but of chaos as origin: a charged state in which matter, spirit, and life itself are only beginning to separate into visible form.

An Early Work from a Radical Beginning

Painted in 1906, this work belongs to the earliest phase of Hilma af Klint’s abstract practice, at a time when such imagery had almost no public place in European art. It was made during a period of intense spiritual inquiry, when she was developing a visual language for ideas she believed could not be conveyed through conventional representation. The painting forms part of the Primordial Chaos group within her larger spiritual project, and it shows her already working with a confidence that places abstraction in the service of cosmology rather than formal experiment alone.

Painting as Reception

Af Klint described her process in terms that set these works apart from ordinary studio practice. She wrote that the pictures were painted directly through her, without preparatory drawing and with great force, and that she worked rapidly without altering the result. That statement is important not just as biography, but as a key to the work itself. She understood these paintings as received as much as made, and that conviction gave them a sense of urgency, purpose, and inner coherence that remains striking.

Creation Through Opposing Forces

At the center of the painting is a vision of creation driven by polarity. Af Klint returns here to one of her most persistent ideas: that existence unfolds through the interaction of complementary forces rather than through a single unified principle. The image suggests movement between feminine and masculine energies, spiritual and material states, and latent and emerging life. Spirals, curving lines, and biomorphic forms create a sense of continuous generation, as though the world is unfolding through relation, tension, and exchange.

Symbol, Color, and Becoming

The painting’s abstract imagery carries a symbolic weight that is unusually direct. Blue is associated with the feminine, yellow with the masculine, and their interaction becomes one of the visual engines of the work. Other motifs, including forms suggestive of fertility, generation, and transformation, reinforce the sense that this is a painting about beginnings at the most fundamental level. Af Klint’s symbols are never merely decorative. They are arranged as if they were part of a visual system for thinking through life before it becomes fixed into stable categories.

Oil on Canvas

The work is painted in oil on canvas and measures 53 × 36.5 cm (20.9 × 14.4 inches). Its relatively modest scale makes the concentration of energy within the image all the more noticeable. The surface is active without becoming crowded, and the use of curved forms and clear color contrasts helps hold the painting in a state of tension between order and emergence.

A Foundational Work in Her Oeuvre

Now held by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, the painting belongs to the body of work that remained largely unseen for decades after her death. Since entering wider view, it has come to be understood as one of the early and decisive works through which af Klint began to formulate an abstract language capable of addressing creation, duality, and the structure of reality itself.