inbetween explorations

Wilhelmine Assmann Untitled, 1905 -1906 Elmar R. Gruber Collection of Mediumistic Art.

“With her spirit guides, Hilma sought to grant herself permission to transform reality and the history of art: the escape into the supernatural found a very concrete effect in reality,” recounts Massimiliano Gioni.

Hilma af Klint Primordial Chaos, The WU/Rose Series, Group 1, 1906 – 1907 Oil on canvas
By courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation Photo: The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

FATA MORGANA curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini, brings together more than 200 works—including paintings, films, photographs, and ritual objects—on display at Palazzo Morando. The historic residence once belonged to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, who lived between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A scholar of esoteric movements linked to the occult, spiritism, and Theosophy, she gathered a vast library, now preserved at the Trivulziana.

Chiara Fumai The Book of Evil Spirits, 2015 Courtesy Archivio Chiara Fumai

But what, then, makes the invisible visible? In dialogue, together with mediums, mystics, and healers, stands the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, a key artist in the exhibition. Sixteen of her canvases are being shown in Milan for the first time. Inspired by spirit guides, she drew concentric circles while in a state of mediumistic trance during her phase of “automatic” experimentation, anticipating non-figurative art long before Kandinsky and Mondrian.

Alongside her, a collective of artists—including Emma Kunz, Annie Besant, Madge Gill, Augustin Lesage, and Fleury-Joseph Crépin—bears witness to a movement that, from the margins, generated propulsion: recognizing the ever-changing nature of all phenomena, they dismantled certainties by drawing on dreams and dialogues with invisible forces. Over them were the eyes of the poet André Breton, spirit guide of the Surrealist movement, who wrote Fata Morgana, in 1940, looking towards a Europe in flames.

Man Ray Groupe Surréaliste (Séance d’écriture automatique), 1924 Collezione privata
Courtesy Gió Marconi Milan.SIAE 2025

In certain places, questions arise that provoke dissent, shatter unsustainable realities and expand boundaries, creating a passage.