Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Author: Tracey Bashkoff, Hilma af Klint

Format: Hardcover | 239 pages

Dimensions: 22.35 × 2.79 × 29.46 cm

Publication date: October 23, 2018

Hilma af Klint's bold abstract works hold a captivating, otherworldly pull

When the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint passed away in 1944 at 81, she left more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper, most of which she had kept out of public view throughout her life. Convinced that the world was not yet prepared for her art, she requested that it stay hidden for two more decades. Yet only in the last few decades have audiences truly begun to engage with her strikingly abstract approach to painting, one that came before the work of Vasily Kandinsky and others commonly credited as pioneers of modernist abstraction. Her vividly colored pieces, many of them monumental in size, represent a far-reaching, spiritually driven effort to map an unseen, all-encompassing cosmic order by combining organic and geometric shapes, written elements, and mystical symbols.

Published alongside the first major retrospective of her work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future presents her pioneering painting series and builds on recent research to offer the most complete account yet of her life and work. Essays examine the social, intellectual, and artistic backdrop to her 1906 departure from representational painting and her later evolution, situating her within Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, the scientific breakthroughs of her era, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable conversation among present-day artists, scholars, and curators explores her influences and her significance for 21st-century art. The book also examines her never-realized vision of a spiral-shaped temple to house her work, a dream that finds a fitting echo in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, where the exhibition took place.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is today recognized as a trailblazer of abstract art. Although her paintings were not shown publicly until 1987, the work she produced in the early 1900s came before the first fully abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich.