- Dates: October 18, 2024–February 2, 2025
- Curators: Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Lucía Agirre, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
- Sponsored by: Iberdrola
- With the cooperation of the Hilma af Klint Foundation
Swedish artist Hilma af Klint eschewed her traditional pictorial training in order to focus on a new type of abstract art informed by her deep spiritual commitments.
The artist devoted nearly a decade to her Paintings for the Temple, which represents a radical effort by af Klint to find visual expression for a transcendent, spiritual reality beyond the observable world.
Hilma af Klint rarely exhibited her most innovative works during her lifetime, and nearly a century would pass before they finally received the recognition they deserve.
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 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 rarely 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 would receive it in an orderly fashion. Her art had to wait nearly one century for the recognition it deserved.