Hilma af Klint at The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
18th October, 2024– 2nd February, 2025
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra
2 48009 Bilbao
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.
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.
CATALOGUE
This exhibition will be accompanied by a profusely illustrated catalogue with texts by the curators of the exhibition, Tracey R. Bashkoff and Lucía Agirre; David Max Horowitz, and Julia Voss, in which they examine the life and work of Hilma af Klint in late 19th and early 20th-century Europe.
DIDAKTIKA
The Museum designs educational spaces, digital content, and special activities to complement each exhibition as part of its Didaktika project, providing tools and resources to enhance the audience’s appreciation of the works on display
The Didaktika space for this exhibition, Encounter with an Era and an Artist, is sponsored by Fundación EDP. In this area, visitors can learn about the major social changes and innovations that marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries and influenced the life and art of Hilma af Klint, such as spiritualism, the rise
of Theosophy, women’s liberation movements, and technological breakthroughs.
An audiovisual production featuring curator Tracey Bashkoff, a summary of Hilma af Klint’s biography, and a copy of the exhibition catalog round out the Didaktika experience.
Programs
Opening Talk (16 October)
Conversation between exhibition curators Tracey Bashkoff and Lucía Agirre in the Auditorium.
Shared Reflections*
Guided tours in which Museum staff members offer different perspectives on the works in the exhibition:
- Curatorial Vision (October 23) with Lucía Agirre, Museum and exhibition curator
- Key Concepts (November 6) with Luz Maguregui Urquiza, Museum’s Education Coordinator
*Sponsored by Fundación Vizcaína Aguirre
Hilma af Klint at The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens from the 18th of October, 2024 until the 2nd of February, 2025
©2024 The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
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