In a brand new interview with Hyperallergic, Erik af Klint, board chair of the Hilma af Klint Basis and the artist’s great-grandnephew, doubled down on his stance that the late Swedish artist’s physique of labor needs to be faraway from institutional and industrial curation fully.
In a cellphone name with Hyperallergic this weekend, Erik moreover pointed to the fourth statute carried out by his grandfather (Hilma’s nephew), who inherited the artist’s work and developed the inspiration in 1972 to steward it. Translated from Swedish, the statute stipulates that the board of the inspiration “must keep the work available to those who seek spiritual knowledge or who can contribute to the work of fulfilling the mission that Hilma af Klint’s spiritual guide intended for it in the future.”
The statute goes on to state that “the board shall take care to make the work available only to individuals who have a sympathetic attitude toward the foundation’s purpose and who will not misuse it.”
Erik, who turned the inspiration’s chairperson solely two years in the past, instructed Hyperallergic that “ both parts of that paragraph are equally important,” noting that the statute’s second sentence specifies that Hilma’s legacy should solely be accessible to a sure subset of individuals and never most people.
“I cannot overlook one or the other,” he continued. “That is what has been done for many years, but when they started to sell socks and NFTs of Hilma’s art, it was just too much.”
An exhibition view of Hilma af Klint: Work for the Future (2018–19) on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (picture Maya Pontone/Hyperallergic)
In 2023, Erik filed a lawsuit in opposition to the opposite board members and the inspiration’s CEO, accusing them of personally profiting off Hilma’s legacy by licensing unique works that had been minted into NFTs and bought. (It’s not instantly clear whether or not the lawsuit is shifting ahead.) Erik additionally went head-to-head with the opposite board members final December because the lone dissenting voice in opposition to a deal that will have made David Zwirner the representing gallery for the inspiration, lambasting the proposal as a “hostile takeover” that will contribute to the chance of Hilma’s “commercialization.” This February, he filed a petition with the Stockholm District Courtroom demanding that every one different board members should resign aside from him.
Per the inspiration’s guidelines, the board chair should be a descendant of the artist and a majority of the trustees should be members of the Anthroposophical Society, which Hilma took nice curiosity in alongside different different non secular actions in her lifetime.
Whereas the inspiration can also be allowed to think about the sale of sure works from the trove of Hilma’s 1,300 work with a purpose to finance the preservation of different works within the assortment, Erik has denounced the sale of any of her works, sustaining that they operate collectively because the artist meant and shouldn’t be separated or commercialized.
“ I am one against four board members, and we are a democracy — if they vote four against one, then I have to submit to that decision even if it goes against the statute,” Erik clarified. “So my only way to protect the statutes is to go to Swedish authorities and say, ‘My board isn’t adhering to the laws of the foundation.’”
With regard to pulling her work from establishments and galleries fully, Erik instructed Hyperallergic that “ for Hilma, this is a holy body of work, and she herself wrote and sketched out ideas” for a spiral-shaped temple for her work after being instructed to take action by a spirit.
Relegated to the sidelines for its summary and cross-spiritual material, Hilma’s legacy emerged from relative obscurity after a landmark 2018 exhibition on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York triggered her work to blow up in reputation.
“I believe there’s a meaning in everything, so when God allowed Hilma to be viewed by the world in this way, there was a purpose to that,” Erik continued. “And the purpose was to create an interest. When she is removed from the public, the people who are truth-seekers will come after her, and they will be the ones who build the temple. They will be the ones who will see the value of looking at the physical art, knowing that [there] is nowhere else in the world you can go to see it.”
In a press release shared by a spokesperson, Hilma af Klint Basis board members Ulf Wagner, Katarina de Voto, Juhani Selvani, and Anders Kumlander expressed that “the majority [of the board] believes that Hilma af Klint’s art should be accessible to both the public and researchers,” and famous that the inspiration has launched into an exterior investigation to discover the opportunity of creating a everlasting museum to deal with Hilma’s creations.
“However, there have been discussions regarding the interpretation of the Foundation’s statutes — the board has, for several years, allowed this matter to be investigated by experts and has concluded that the text must be interpreted in a more contemporary context,” their assertion continued.
Stating that the board has the ultimate say on how the statutes are interpreted, the trustees mentioned that they adhere to the aforementioned investigation and are working to maintain Hilma’s work accessible to those that want to see and be taught from it — “just as the previous boards have done before us over the years.”
The board members didn’t touch upon Erik’s current petition and mentioned that the inspiration is constant its work as ordinary regardless of the continuing debate.
