The Seven-Pointed Star No. 1 (1908 CE)

Energy seems to gather and release across the surface of Sjustjärnan, nr. 1 (The Seven-Pointed Star No. 1). Rather than organizing the image around a single fixed center, Hilma af Klint lets forms expand, coil, and generate new points of focus, giving the painting a sense of movement that feels both cosmic and inward. Made in 1908, the work belongs to a moment when her abstraction was becoming more confident, more systematic, and more fully bound to her spiritual vision.

One Work in a Structured Sequence

This painting is one of twenty-one works in The Seven-Pointed Star series, a group that marks an important phase in af Klint’s development. In these works, she moved further away from conventional representation and more deeply into abstract form, using shape, color, and line to explore unseen relationships rather than visible appearances. The series belongs to the larger body of work through which she sought to give visual form to spiritual and metaphysical ideas, especially those shaped by Theosophy and related esoteric currents.

Painting Under Spiritual Direction

Af Klint understood her artistic process as guided, at least in part, by spiritual entities or higher forces. For The Seven-Pointed Star series, she followed a disciplined structure: three groups of seven paintings, each made at seven-day intervals. That numerical order was not incidental. It gave the series an internal rhythm and helped frame the act of painting as a process of reception as much as invention.

At the same time, the works are far from mechanically repetitive. Within the imposed structure, af Klint allowed considerable variation, and that tension between order and freedom is part of what gives the series its vitality. The controlled yet flowing lines in this painting still recall her earlier automatic drawings, but they are now more directed, as if spontaneity had been brought into a new, deliberate system.

The Meaning of Seven

The number seven carries particular weight here. Across many traditions it is associated with order, completion, and cosmic structure, and within Theosophy it could also suggest spiritual transmission and higher harmony. The title therefore does more than identify a motif. It places the painting within a symbolic framework in which number, rhythm, and form participate in a larger vision of the universe as interconnected and intelligible.

That helps explain why the work feels less like a free improvisation than a diagram of forces in motion. The spiraling forms do not simply decorate the surface; they seem to trace the expansion of energy, the emergence of new centers, and the continuous relation between movement and order.

Tempera, Gouache, and Graphite

The painting is executed in tempera, gouache, and graphite on paper mounted on canvas, and it measures 62.5 × 76 cm (24.6 × 29.9 inches). These materials allowed af Klint to combine luminous color with clearly defined linear structure. The result is a surface that feels both fluid and controlled, with the spiraling forms given enough clarity to hold the composition together while still preserving a sense of unfolding motion.

A Foundation Work in Her Abstract Language

Today, The Seven-Pointed Star No. 1 is part of the collection of the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm. It stands as one of the works through which af Klint’s early abstraction can be seen taking on a more deliberate and expansive form, joining spiritual symbolism to a visual language that was unlike anything else being made at the time.