Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is an exhibition catalog edited by Tracey Bashkoff that accompanies the first major U.S. survey of Swedish abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. It presents her painting series and scholarship on her life and art, including the large-scale, vividly colored abstractions through which she combined natural and geometric forms, text, and esoteric symbols to investigate an invisible spiritual order.

Essays examine af Klint’s 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development in relation to Swedish modernism, folk art, scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable of contemporary artists, scholars, and curators discusses her sources and relevance to twenty-first-century art.

The book also explores her unrealized plan for a spiral-shaped temple to display her work, a point of connection with the Guggenheim Museum rotunda where the exhibition was held.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) left more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper when she died at age 81. She had kept much of the work private and stipulated that it remain unseen for another 20 years; her paintings were not publicly shown until 1987. Her early twentieth-century abstractions predate the first purely abstract paintings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich.