A rarely seen abstract painting by Hilma af Klint will be offered at Bukowskis in Stockholm on November 19 with an estimate of SEK 6 million to SEK 8 million (about $600,000 to $800,000) - several times the artist's current auction record. The work, Serie III No., is a 38.5 by 29 cm oil and graphite on canvas dated January 1920, a period when af Klint was at her most productive, making 85 works in a few months of hard-edged geometric abstraction built on triangles, circles and rectangles punctuated with Theosophical symbols.

Af Klint's works almost never appear at auction because the foundation established by her nephew in 1972 tightly controls the supply of her abstract paintings. Serie III No. was bought by a private collector in 1995, when it was deaccessioned by the foundation, and has stayed in the same hands ever since. The standing record for the artist is relatively modest: $165,825 for The Power of the Spleen, a 1931 watercolour, sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk in 2019.

Market interest in af Klint has surged as institutions catch up with her posthumous reputation. France staged its first major retrospective, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), at the Grand Palais in Paris over the summer, and the National Gallery of Ireland opened Hilma af Klint: Artist and Visionary last week, running until February 7, 2027.

The November sale will test whether that institutional appetite now translates into auction-room heat. If Serie III No. reaches its high estimate, it would multiply the artist's record roughly fivefold and mark one of the most significant Swedish auction results of the autumn season.