A New Age: The Spiritual in Art

Whether it is a religion, a movement, a mood, a lifestyle, a parallel universe of workshops or individuals seeking self-redemption—New Age people grapple from various directions and in different ways, seeking a spiritual dimension in a materialistic, practical and goal-oriented world, a world that has thrown off its religion. These searches stem from a deep sense of absence experienced by contemporary secular individuals: those whose religious beliefs have been taken, whose souls have undergone deconstruction, whom western rationalism has left sober and pessimistic. Science no longer offers an answer to the inner depletion and technology only exacerbates the sense of alienation from the world. From this sense of unrest, it seems right to seek alternatives in anything that isn’t western, rational, pragmatic and achievement-oriented and indeed these were found in the religions of the Orient, in pagan beliefs and in mystical worldviews.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) and Emma Kunz (1892–1963) strolled through these paths during the first half of the 20th century. They experienced communication with other worlds, telepathy and contact with cosmic energies; visions and séances were part of their spiritual world. In their work they expressed the existence of another world, where the individual and collective are one, a world that is not based on polar binary but rather on the unity of contrasts. Their works, presented for the first time in Israel, feature in the exhibition alongside works by artists living and working in the early 21st century: Marina Abramović, Muntean/Rosenblum, Friedrich Kunath & Adam Rabinowitz, and Maxime Rossi. Each body of works in the exhibition expresses the existence of other worlds, unseen and imperceptible, as well as the sensations and senses that allow us to acknowledge these worlds. The present-day works represent a stance that is not cynical about the fantastic world yet, being contemporary, they are aware that the search for spiritualism is held as part of a popular-consumer culture within the western comfort zone.

Hilma af klint and Emma Kunz did not achieve acknowledgement in their lifetime, among other reasons because spiritualism and mysticism were not part of the Modernist discourse in art. In the past decades, the attitude to spiritual art has changed, and the exhibition seeks to acknowledge this change and to present New Age as one of its causes. In fact, it aims to redeem the positive reputation that New Age never had, and to present it as a phenomenon that gradually opened new horizons to art and enabled a new, retroactive reading of the history of art; and as the source of the renewed interest in art that deals with the metaphysical and the super-natural.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky’s renowned essay published in 1912, exists in the exhibition’s title as a “seriousness-meter”: the issue itself as well as the external observation, from afar, with awareness of the complexity that accompanies New Age spirituality. It places a historical anchor to manifestations of the mystical, the cosmic and the esoteric in the art of the New Age: the Age of Aquarius, the age of spiritual-growth workshops, the age of late Capitalism.