Hilma af Klint's Pioneering Abstraction Gets Major Guggenheim Retrospective

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is hosting the first major solo exhibition in the United States dedicated to Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Titled 'Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future', the show features over 170 works and focuses on her transformative years from 1906 to 1920. In 1906, af Klint began creating radically abstract paintings—bold, colorful, and detached from the physical world—years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others made similar strides to free art from descriptive content. Despite her pioneering role, af Klint rarely exhibited her visionary works, believing the world was not ready for them, and stipulated they not be shown for twenty years after her death. Her output remained largely hidden until 1986, and only in the last three decades have her paintings and works on paper received serious scholarly attention. The exhibition is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, with David Horowitz as curatorial assistant, and is organized in collaboration with the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm. The show runs through April 23, 2019, and invites a reassessment of modernism and its development.