Eleanor Heartley writes for Art in America:
(…) at the advent of the second quarter of the 21st century, a pileup of crises—social, political, environmental, and technological—seems to have all but extinguished the sense of optimism about the future that flared periodically throughout the 20th century. Af Klint’s mysterious, luminous abstractions offer a salve to our jangled nerves. They also, as Higgie suggests, provide a stand-in for the values of feminism, environmentalism, collectivity, and spirituality that run counter to the current fixation on money, testosterone, and power.
Af Klint is just one manifestation of the art world’s embrace of what we might describe as a spiritual turn, with the MoMA exhibition emphasizing her work’s mystical side. The turn we are witnessing is wide-ranging, encompassing everything from an interest in esoteric rituals and the occult to the amplification of Indigenous, non-Western, and precolonial spiritual practices. It includes an embrace of the divine feminine and the framing of ecological concerns in terms of reverence for nature. What unites these disparate ideas is a resistance to materialism and a rejection of our heedless instrumentalization of all things earthly, from nature to culture.
The days when a whiff of religious belief or spiritual concerns would discredit an artist are long gone.