The hashtag #HilmaAfKlint has been used on Instagram 34,611 times. That is more than both #BridgetRiley (18.2K) and #SoniaDelaunay (17.3K), but less than #JacksonPollock (151K). Under Hilma Af Klint’s hashtag, you will find fashion items directly inspired by her colourful paintings, nail art which scales her motifs down to miniature form and jewellery that re-interprets these geometric shapes. Selfies in front of her paintings abound (they are currently on display at the Guggenheim in New York, as part of her first major solo exhibition in the United States), while others pose with prints of her work at home. Captions read along the lines of, “Feeling all sorts of spiritual”; “Today I worshipped at the altar of Hilma Af Klint”; and, “I think that Hilma and I would have been friends”.

It might seem surprising that an obscure artist, who was born in 1862 in Stockholm and died in 1944, could elicit such emotion more than 150 years after their arrival in this world. But Af Klint’s remarkable story, involving spiritualism and fierce modesty (her instructions for her work to be kept sealed until twenty years after her death are frequently cited), has become a crucial part of the personal mythology that has been built up around her. Her late embrace from the margins of art history has only added to the mystery and against-the-odds triumph of her work, in a narrative arc not dissimilar to that afforded to outsider artists.

Af Klint herself, however, was far from an outsider artist. She graduated from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1887 and quickly established herself as a respected painter, serving briefly as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists. She also became deeply involved in spiritualism and Theosophy, which were popular in literary and artistic circles as many sought to reconcile long-held religious beliefs with scientific advances. Her first abstract works grew out of these belief systems, in an attempt to articulate mystical views of reality.

The biomorphic and geometric forms that recur in these paintings, on both expansive and intimate scales, reveal a strikingly prescient approach to composition and colour. They are suggestive of artists such as Agnes Martin and Victor Vasarely, as well as Bridget Riley and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom were working decades after Af Klint set out on her early spiritual investigations in painting. But beyond the art world, these works speak to a broader graphic design sensibility, and an immensely modern understanding of visual communication and branding.

“They have a sense of order to them that’s disrupted and energized by the hand, in the way that a lot of design work did throughout the twentieth century, and particularly in mid-century examples, like Saul Bass, Alexander Girard, Paul Rand, Elaine Lustig Cohen and earlier examples like Elizabeth Friedlander, Anni Albers (in the more expanded field of design) and Willem Sandberg,” art and design journalist Billie Muraben muses. But why are the simple shapes used by Af Klint (and many in the Bauhaus and various mid-century design movements) quite so visually pleasing and satisfying, even to this day? “I think there’s something in the balance between order/chaos, information/interpretation, in representations of geometric shapes being expressed or worked out by the human hand that’s just totally fascinating.”