SPELLBOUND on Fazit in Deutschlandfunk Kultur

Explore SPELLBOUND, now featured in a special Fazit radio report by Tobi Müller on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. In a seven-minute cultural dispatch from Stockholm, Müller steps inside the Firestorm Foundation’s new exhibition, weaving together myth, spirituality, and powerful works by artists from Hilma af Klint to Cindy Sherman and beyond.

Read the English translation here, or listen to the original report on Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s website: Listen here

“Spellbound” in Stockholm: Myths and Art from Hilma af Klint to Cindy Sherman

Presenter: Reason, rationality, has been the standard for all human action at least since the Enlightenment — the belief in the human being as a rational creature who not only masters nature but also develops technological innovations and remains in control of them. Today, this belief can be questioned, especially since so much seems in danger of spiraling out of control — from the supposedly mastered natural world, to intelligent technology, to people who act in anything but a rational manner yet wield enormous power. Perhaps this is why interest in the spiritual is once again growing in art.

From around the middle of the 19th century onward, one increasingly encounters works that engage with divine energies, spirits, and the dead — something that can currently be seen in an exhibition in Stockholm.

My colleague Tobi Müller visited it for Fazit. Tobi, what kind of works are on view there?

Tobi Müller: First of all, these are new gallery spaces — they’re quite large — belonging to the Firestorm Foundation. You have to know a bit of the background.
This is a foundation founded by Cristina Ljungberg, an American. She runs several non-profit organizations focused on research into women’s health, including in structurally weak regions of the world. That explains, to some extent, her interest in this kind of art.

Firestorm is also an art foundation and now a collection consisting primarily of works by women. From this, curator Jennifer Higgie, an Australian, has grouped nearly 50 works under the title Spellbound — “enchanted” — displayed in six unusually blue-painted rooms.
Normally gallery walls are white. The curatorial gesture here lies in bringing together some works that are over a hundred years old — paintings and sculptures — with younger art, particularly Swedish contemporary works.

As soon as you enter, you see a large eye, a symbol of seeing beyond appearances. There is also a cosmic tree — roughly what one might imagine esoteric art to look like. But there is also a great deal of art that simply testifies to the presence of a higher power and can look very different in each case.

There are also famous names: a painting by the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning; an almost archaically pregnant nude torso by Louise Bourgeois; a brightly colored sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle — a so-called Nana; a shadowy nighttime photograph by Cindy Sherman; and an almost hundred-year-old painting by the German-Swedish-Jewish painter Lotte Laserstein.

Much of this is rarely seen in Germany. There is also The Seated Old Woman — a woman in the dark, presumably in front of a fire, perhaps a kind of witch.
Yes, as you already said: spellbound, enchanted.

I immediately thought of Alfred Hitchcock’s film — or rather the Netflix production from about a year ago with Nicole Kidman. The fascination with the supernatural, the spiritual, has never completely disappeared. How does it manifest itself in this exhibition?

Jennifer Higgie, who worked for many years at the renowned British art magazine Frieze, published a very informative book about this a year and a half ago. I can only recommend it. It’s called The Other Side. “The other side” can refer to the realm of the dead or to anything that initially eludes so-called reality.

She describes how technological innovations — Morse code, the telegraph, the railway, and especially X-rays — turned existing notions of reality upside down. Interest in spiritualism, in other words direct communication with the dead, increased dramatically as a result — even among the upper classes and the artistic bohemia.

Yet within art itself, the emotional, dreamlike realm was largely left to women. Aesthetically, this led very early to abstraction — even if it was meant quite concretely — and this happened before art history later named abstraction through Kandinsky.

One important figure today is the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Interest in her work is far greater posthumously than it was during her lifetime about a hundred years ago. Jennifer Higgie told me how encountering af Klint’s work changed her and marked the beginning of her interest in spiritual art.

Jennifer Higgie quote: “I knew who Hilma af Klint was, but I hadn’t seen much of her work. Then, in 2013, during a press trip to Stockholm, I entered the exhibition, and my body reacted so strongly that even today I find it hard to describe.”

She was also engaged in developing a kind of visual language — a way of exploring the indescribable in extraordinary ways — as early as 1906 or 1907. In art history, I learned that Kandinsky created the first truly abstract work around 1911.

Tobi Müller: Yes, art history is really being rewritten here — and very clearly so in this exhibition in Sweden.

Of course, we also see a work by Hilma af Klint in the exhibition — Eldslågor, or in English Fiery Flames from 1930, a late work. She died in 1944.

Presenter: The boundaries between the supernatural and esotericism are fluid. I think the term has already come up — and it always carries a certain skepticism.
Is it possible to clearly separate these things in the exhibition?

Tobi Müller: No, I think that would be very difficult. I had to overcome my own skepticism to really immerse myself in these 50 works. In her book, Higgie repeatedly shows how spirituality has often been accompanied by profitable nonsense — then and now.

What I miss in the exhibition — and in many contemporary spiritual aesthetics — is a clearer warning about the danger of surrendering to something vague, amorphous, and instinctual. There are open borders here to authoritarian ideas — Rudolf Steiner, for instance — and even to fascist tendencies, at least historically. Some clearer positioning would have been helpful in the exhibition.

Presenter: Tobi, perhaps half a minute on the question of women, which we haven’t really addressed yet — namely why it still seems to be predominantly women who engage with these themes.

Tobi Müller: I asked Jennifer Higgie about that too. She said that it is still the case today that mainly women are working with these ideas. It really is a trend in art.
However, I suspect that this perspective leaves out many non-European artists — from Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa —where people often seek connections to very ancient cultural roots that always have a spiritual dimension. And there, it is often men who engage with this.

I believe that in the end, this trend is universally understandable. When everything begins to slip — fueled by technological developments even faster than in the 19th century — people turn to old themes, including those that are not immediately visible and cannot be captured by machines.
That is where art comes into play — it is its domain.

Presenter: Tobi Müller on Spellbound, an exhibition at the Firestorm Foundation in Stockholm about the spiritual in art history and the present.