On Friday evenings in late-1890s Stockholm, five women would bolt the studio door, light candles, and gather closely around a small wooden table. They sang hymns, read verses from the New Testament, and slipped into quiet meditative trances. With graphite pencils resting lightly between their fingers, their hands drifted across sketchbooks without conscious direction, channeling messages from unseen guides they called the High Masters.
Years before Wassily Kandinsky published his 1911 treatise on spiritual resonance or Kazimir Malevich hung his Black Square in Petrograd, this Swedish circle, known as De Fem (The Five), was already inventing non-objective art. In Scandinavia, abstraction emerged directly from shared occult rituals in private rooms, entirely separate from the theoretical manifestos circulating in Munich or Paris.
That collaborative impulse takes center stage in Arcana Borealis: Northern Women and Esotericism, a landmark exhibition opening October 23, 2026, at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki. Organized by the Finnish National Gallery and running through February 28, 2027, the presentation gathers more than 200 works by roughly 50 artists from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sápmi.
Curated by art historians Dr. Nina Kokkinen and Dr. Marja Lahelma, the show directly confronts the myth of the solitary male genius. Drawing its title from the Latin words for hidden knowledge (arcana) and the north (borealis), the exhibition explores how séances, Theosophy, and nature animism sparked a shared visual language. Across painting, beaten metal, and woven thread, five distinct styles reveal how this spiritual bedrock took form.
1. Geometric Spiritualism: Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 1 (1915)
Painted in her Stockholm studio, Hilma af Klint's The Swan, No. 1 (1915) anchors the exhibition's geometric wing. Preserved by the Hilma af Klint Foundation as part of her monumental cycle The Paintings for the Temple, the composition stages an alchemical collision between two mirrored swans against saturated fields of red and blue.
A black swan with a yellow beak dives downward from the spiritual sphere, while a white swan with blue accents ascends from the material plane. Their beaks and wingtips meet at the exact mathematical center of the canvas, forming an unbroken horizontal axis. In theosophical and hermetic philosophy, the swan symbolizes the balance of opposites: light and darkness, spirit and matter, male and female forces meeting in mutual equilibrium.
As the 24-canvas Swan series unfolds, af Klint steadily dissolves the anatomy of the birds into concentric mandalas, checkerboards, and color wheels. The geometric discipline functions as an alchemical diagram of cosmic balance. Af Klint recognized that her contemporaries were unprepared for this visual grammar, leaving explicit instructions that her temple paintings remain hidden until two decades after her death.
2. Occult Automatism and Co-Creation: Anna Cassel and The Five
For decades, conventional art history treated Anna Cassel (1860–1937) as an aristocratic patron who helped finance af Klint's studio. That footnote collapsed with the recent discovery of Cassel's occult sketchbooks in Järna, Sweden, documented in the 2023 volume Anna Cassel: The Saga of the Rose. The Ateneum exhibition places Cassel at the absolute core of early abstract experimentation.
In 1896, Cassel co-founded De Fem alongside af Klint, Sigrid Hedman, Mathilda Nilsson, and Cornelia Cederberg. Meeting weekly, the group produced hundreds of collaborative trance drawings and esoteric diagrams. Their shared sketchbooks display interlocking spirals, crystalline structures, and botanical glyphs created decades before the Parisian Surrealists began experimenting with psychic automatism in the 1920s.
Cassel's surviving independent canvases feature radiant botanical spirals, metallic pigment washes, and branching motifs linked to the Tree of Knowledge. Curatorial analysis indicates that Cassel contributed direct brushwork to several foundational canvases in the Paintings for the Temple. Her work confirms that Nordic abstraction drew power from an active creative circle rather than an isolated auteur.
3. Cosmic Luminous Materiality: Anna-Eva Bergman, N° 2-1953 Stèle avec lune
Working in postwar Paris and Norway, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909–1987) translated northern geography into raw mineral light. In canvases like N° 2-1953 Stèle avec lune, Bergman abandoned expressive brushwork in favor of a striking physical process: burnishing thin sheets of gold, silver, and aluminum leaf directly onto dark tempera grounds.
Bergman applied gesso and dark tempera to canvas, adhered metallic foils, and used palette knives to scratch through the paint layers. The resulting compositions evoke the sheer cliffs of northern Norway, Arctic midnight horizons, and ancient standing stones. Rather than depicting light falling across a landscape, the metallic foil catches ambient room light, giving the surface the quiet radiance of an unearthed icon.
4. Ancestral Animism and Totemic Form: Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Bronze Sculptures
In the sculpture galleries of Arcana Borealis, Danish artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984) shifts abstraction into physical weight. Associated with the Danish Høst group and early CoBrA circles, Ferlov Mancoba lived in Paris through the hardships of World War II alongside her husband, South African artist Ernest Mancoba.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Ferlov Mancoba developed a sequence of semi-abstract bronzes dominated by mask-like heads and standing figures. She favored tactile folklore and ritual presence over Bauhaus geometry, drawing inspiration from non-Western sculpture. Pieces like her wartime plaster Mask (1939) feature deeply recessed eyes, sharp central ridges, and sculpted handles meant to be gripped, functioning as spiritual sentinels against violence and isolation.
5. Indigenous Spatial Mysticism: Outi Pieski, Contemporary Textile Installations
The exhibition extends its lineage straight to contemporary Sámi artist Outi Pieski, who brings northern spiritual abstraction into three-dimensional space. Based in Ohcejohka (Utsjoki) in Finnish Sápmi, Pieski creates suspended installations using thousands of hand-knotted threads from the fringes of traditional Sámi shawls (liidni), worn as part of the gákti dress.
In works like Beavvit (Rising Together), these vivid yellow, crimson, and deep blue threads cascade from the gallery ceiling in floating waves that move with every passing visitor. The practice is grounded in duodji, the collective Sámi tradition of handicraft rooted in ancestral philosophy and ecological care. Knotted alongside fellow Sámi women craftspeople (duojárs), the installation turns communal textile labor into spatial music. The title word beavvit translates to "good friends" in Northern Sámi, phonetically echoing beaivi ("the sun").
Curatorial Synthesis: The Living Architecture of Abstraction
The true achievement of Arcana Borealis is showing that abstraction never belonged to a single manifesto or city. By bringing over 200 works from museum archives into the light, the Ateneum exhibition proves that non-objective form originated as a spiritual, communal, and intensely physical search for meaning.
Hilma af Klint, Anna Cassel, and their peers painted to map what eyes could not see, trusting their circle when institutions offered only silence. For modern art lovers and collectors drawn to sacred geometry, cosmic light, and elemental forms, bringing thoughtful abstract wall art into a personal space keeps that quiet dialogue alive. When you stand before these works, abstraction feels alive: an intimate, daring search for what lies beneath the visible world.
