[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/HAK-karusell_xxlarge.jpeg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tA Swedish auction house will sell an abstract painting by Hilma af Klint, an artist whose work almost never comes to market.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe painting, titled Ser III No. 5<\/em> (1920), will be sold by the Stockholm-based Bukowskis house during a November 19 sale of modern art and design objects. It has been given an estimate of $600,000\u2013$800,000, and if it reaches even its low estimate, the work will shatter af Klint\u2019s prior auction record.<\/p>\n \n\tOnce a relatively obscure figure within 20th-century art history, af Klint has come to be seen as a giant of her time. A hit 2018 Guggenheim Museum retrospective in New York credited her with inventing abstraction.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Swedish artist\u2019s paintings, often composed of pyramids, looping lines, and flowerlike forms, were inspired by her encounters with spirits from worlds beyond our own. Her spiritualism led her to conceptualize a temple to house her work that was never realized. Her great-grandnephew, who also chairs her foundation, has sought to realize that temple, which would act as a repository for her art and keep it out of museums, but no such plan to open the structure has materialized yet.<\/p>\n \n\tThough af Klint\u2019s work is increasingly being shown in art museums, with the Grand Palais having mounted a survey in Paris earlier this year, it\u2019s unusual to see her work pop up in commercial galleries and on the auction block. So rare are market opportunities that anytime one does happen, it\u2019s considered an event. When David Zwirner gallery exhibited her \u201cTree of Knowledge\u201d series in 2021, the work was promptly bought by Glenstone, a museum in Potomac, Maryland, founded by Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales.<\/p>\n \n\tAf Klint\u2019s foundation has sought to tightly control how her work is shown, which is why it is rarely made available for sale. According to the foundation, af Klint herself demanded that her art not be commercialized. A plan to forge a potential relationship between the foundation and David Zwirner fell through after two of af Klint\u2019s descendants inveighed against it. (The family\u2019s controversial stewardship of af Klint\u2019s legacy has reportedly generated disagreement behind the scenes at the foundation.)<\/p>\n \n\tBukowskis said that Ser III No. 5<\/em>, one of 85 paintings af Klint produced during a three-month burst of artistic activity in 1920, had been held by the same unidentified collector since 1995. The collector purchased the work after the foundation made \u201ca small number of works\u201d available for sale in the early \u201990s, the house stated in its release.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to Bukowskis, only two of af Klint\u2019s paintings have ever been sold at auction, \u201cboth more than 30 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIt was not clear to what degree, if at all, the Hilma af Klint Foundation was involved in the plan to sell Ser III No. 5<\/em>. ARTnews<\/em> has reached out to the foundation for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/hilma-af-klint-auction-bukowskis-1234803046\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/HAK-karusell_xxlarge.jpeg?w=1024″] A Swedish auction house will sell an abstract painting by Hilma af Klint, an artist whose work almost never comes to market. The painting, titled Ser III No. 5 (1920), will be sold by the Stockholm-based Bukowskis house during a November 19 sale of modern art and design objects. It has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2209129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2209129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2209129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2209129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2209129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}