We are excited to announce that the next in the series of free webinars organized by the Colour Society of Australia will be a presentation by archivist and art historian Kristen Tivey from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York. Kristen will speak on colour and composition in the works of Hilma af Klint, the fascinating and groundbreaking artist who is the subject of the major exhibition Hilma af Klint, The Secret Paintings that opened at the Art Gallery of NSW last weekend.
Please help us to spread word of this exciting event by sharing our authorized social media posts from the Colour Society of Australia Facebook and Instagram accounts, or by passing on the following event link to your friends, colleagues and students. https://coloursociety.org.au/event-4368004
Hilma af Klint was one of the earliest practitioners of abstraction in painting in the Western world. She lived from 1862 to 1944 in Sweden, and from 1906 through 1915 produced her best known work, Paintings for the Temple, a series of 193 paintings. This presentation will explore how Hilma af Klint synthesized the myriad of influences present at the turn of the century, including theosophical, mathematical, scientific, and optical schools of thought, to create a striking abstract storyline in Paintings for the Temple. Focusing specifically on the sub-series Group IX/SUW, The Swan (The Swan Series), 1914-1915, this presentation will discuss how ideas of ether, planes of consciousness, and the atom inspired af Klint's compositional language, and how Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's writings on the emotional and spiritual power of color, as well as Johann Wolfgang Goethe's framework of light and dark, informed af Klint's use of color as an organizing narrative power.
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Kristen Tivey MA/MSLIS is an art historian and archivist with eight years of experience archiving in the contemporary art and architecture world of New York City. She currently works in the archives of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York City, always seeking to combine her art historical interest in abstraction with her archival interest in the accessibility of information, especially in the form of digital and born-digital collections. She graduated with distinction in May 2020 from Pratt Institute of New York with a Masters in Library and Information Science and a Masters in the History of Art and Design. Her Master's thesis, Symbol and Science in Hilma af Klint's "Swan Series", explores the many facets of meaning behind the twenty-four paintings of the Swan Series within af Klint's greater work Paintings for the Temple, focusing primarily on two thematic areas: the symbolic meaning of the swan and the influence of scientific discovery on af Klint's composition.
This webinar is free but registration is essential and limited to 100 participants worldwide, so early registration is advised. Successful registrants will be notified by reply email and will be sent the link and instructions to join the webinar on the Zoom platform shortly before the event. To receive this email with the Zoom link, the deadline for registration is 24 hours before the event.
This event continues a series of webinars organized and presented free of charge by the Colour Society of Australia NSW Division during the covid-19 crisis. These webinars are open to CSA members and non-members around Australia and the world, but as a reward to our wonderful members we make bookings available to members-only for about a week before we make them available publicly, to ensure that no member need miss out on a place provided that they register promptly. Registration for non-members opens on June 23.
