Hilma af Klint was born in Sweden and spent part of her early childhood at a naval academy where her father was based^[2]. Summers were spent on Adelsö, an island in Lake Mälaren, where her fascination with the natural world first took hold; she moved to Stockholm at around ten years old, though comparatively little else is documented about her early years^[2]. That early attention to plants, shells and organic form stayed with her, feeding directly into the botanical and biological forms that recur throughout her later abstract work.

Af Klint attended her first séance as a teenager, and the loss of a sister not long afterward deepened her turn toward spiritualism and the occult^[2]. In 1882 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, part of the first generation of women accepted there, studying until 1887^[2]. After graduating with honours, she supported herself for years as a working painter of traditional landscapes and portraits, the only side of her career that was publicly known during her lifetime^[1][2].

In 1896 af Klint and four fellow female artists formed a group they called The Five, meeting regularly, by one account weekly until 1906, to hold séances and experiment with automatic writing and drawing they believed came through contact with spirit guides^[2]. This practice of unconsciously produced image-making anticipated the automatism later associated with the Surrealists by several decades^[2]. It was this discipline, developed privately and outside any public exhibition, that eventually carried af Klint from conventional painting into the abstract, symbol-laden work of her later career.