Hilma af Klint

Curator: Lucia Agirre and Trace Bashkoff

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Hilma af Klint, a comprehensive survey of the career of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (b. 1862, Stockholm; d. 1944, Stockholm), sponsored by Iberdrola. The show spans from her early works on traditional themes, her automatic drawings with De Fem (The Five) and her most outstanding series, including “Paintings for the Temple”, “Parsifal”, the “Atom Series”, to the watercolors of her final years.

The artist exhibited her production in her lifetime, but mostly her more traditional figurative paintings. She only twice presented her abstract art publicly, and never showed it in mainstream artworld settings. She instead sought to share it with likeminded spiritual communities but struggled to find an enthusiastic audience. Coming to believe the world was not yet prepared to accept her work, Hilma af Klint took pains to store and catalog it so that the society of the future could receive it in. Her art had to wait nearly one century for the recognition it deserved.

In 1906, Hilma af Klint began her most important and ground-breaking project, on which she spent almost a decade. Her Paintings for the Temple comprise a total of 193 paintings and drawings in which the artist set aside her formal education to instead create a new, nonobjective art informed by her relationship with spiritualism and other philosophies, such as Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and later Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy.

Intended to hang in a spiral temple that was never realized, the “Paintings for the Temple” explore what remains hidden from the human eye, a topic which interested both the scientific and spiritual movements of the day and which was of great interest to Hilma af Klint and other modernist artists.