At the Guggenheim Bilbao, the soaring modernity of Hilma af Klint exalted

Had Hilma af Klint found a portal allowing her to travel into the future? This is the impression given his amazing paintings that the public discovered, amazed, in 2013 thanks to a first major exhibition in his native Swedenau Moderna Museet de Stockholm.

How can we believe that these superb compositions of a radical modernitymade of flat areas of bright colors, sharp contrasts and precisely traced geometric shapes, were painted in the years 1900–1910and for some from 1906?

A pioneering artist of abstraction and even pop art

Rectangles of opposite colors, discs or color triangles on a plain background, rosettes and bundles of rays drawn with a line… Well before 1913, the long-accepted date of the first abstract work (a watercolor by Wassily Kandinsky), the compositions of Hilma af Klint announced , for some, geometric abstraction by Piet Mondrian and the famous Black square on white background by Kasimir Malevich (1915), for others the rainbow cogs by Sonia and Robert Delaunay, or (for the older ones) the pop art of the sixties as well as the purple, pink and orange patterns of the movement Flower Power…

These surprising successions of paintings sometimes evoke story-boards which would narrate the evolution from figuration to abstraction.

Was Hilma af Klint the first abstract artist (men and women combined) of history? “It’s ultimately not very important to know who was first,” retorts Lucía Agirre, curator at the Guggenheim Bilbao and co-curator of the exhibition. What matters is that she had no preview of abstract art, she had not seen any example.”