Hilma af Klint was featured in the Guggenheim’s 2018 exhibition “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.”
The exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum ran from 12 October 2018 to 23 April 2019. It presented a large selection of af Klint’s abstract paintings and drew broad attention to an artist whose work had long been less familiar to the general public than that of several male modernists.
Af Klint was a Swedish artist born in 1862. She began making abstract works in 1906, before many of the artists traditionally associated with the early history of European abstraction. Her paintings often used geometric forms, symbolic colors, spirals, and diagrams, and she connected much of this work with spiritual and philosophical ideas.
The exhibition title is sometimes shortened in casual references, but the artist’s full name is Hilma af Klint. She is not the same person as Wassily Kandinsky, another pioneer of abstract art who is often mentioned in comparisons of early abstraction.