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SO THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF THINGS TO UNPACK ABOUT MR. ROBOT 4.07 but I wanted to talk about the paintings (prints) in Krista’s apartment.
These are works by Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist and mystic. In her lifetime, she was known primarily as a botanical illustrator, but while she was doing that, she was also part of a group of women who called themselves “The Five” (De Fem). They were heavily into the spiritualism of the late 19th/early 20th century, particularly Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy, and their activities included seances and communion with beings they called “The High Masters”.
af Klint brought this and her scientific reading and background into a series of paintings for “The Temple”, and she believed her direction for this came from the High Masters. She created 193 paintings for the The Temple, and spent the rest of her life after that diving further into abstract art. When she died at 82 in 1944, she left her paintings to her nephew, with the strict instructions that they not be shown until 20 years after her death. Since their first public exhibition, her work has been growing in renown, and the Guggenheim hosted a massive retrospective of her work in 2019.
The first of the two works in Krista’s apartment, in the living/dining room where the action begins, is one of the “altarpiece” paintings, specifically Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece. The second, in the room where The Shit Really Hits the Fan in Act Four, is from the “SUW/UW series”, and is called Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 12. Both date from 1915.
Now I’m not an art history person, so all I have to go on is the exhibition catalogue, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, edited by Tracey Bashkoff.
Here’s what Bashkoff writes about the Altarpiece paintings:
The works appear to relate to Theosophy’s version of evolutionary theory, in which all the cosmos is undergoing an evolutionary process. Evolution can occur in two directions, elevating from the physical to the spiritual and descending from a higher level of being to the limitations of the material world.
The imagery in The Dove relies on Christian symbols for peace and unity, figuratively and abstractly, in combination with the allegory of St. George and the Dragon, and the signs of the Zodiac.
You’ll notice that The Dove No. 12 includes the zodiac symbols for (clockwise from top right) Pisces, Gemini, Taurus, and Aries. I will let someone better versed than me in zodiac symbology pick that one apart.
So. It’s not exactly subtle of Esmail to have picked a couple of deeply spiritually-imbued artworks reflecting themes of evolution, peace, etc. (and dragon-slaying!), but at least he did so with an artist who is really quite extraordinary, and whose work deserves to be much better known.
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