In 1906, Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist and trained painter, began creating a groundbreaking body of abstract work—years before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich touched the genre.
Guided by her deep interest in spirituality, geometry, and nature, she produced hundreds of paintings that seemed to belong not to her time, but to the future. Vivid colors, spirals, symbols, and complex structures filled her canvases, forming a visual language meant to communicate the unseen.
Yet she kept these works largely hidden. Convinced the world wasn’t ready, Hilma left instructions that they not be shown until at least 20 years after her death.
She died in 1944. Her abstract paintings—more than 1,200 of them—remained in storage until the 1960s and were only brought to wider attention decades later. It wasn’t until the 2010s, with major exhibitions, that her place as a pioneer of abstract art was finally recognized.
Hilma af Klint didn’t just anticipate the future—she painted it, quietly, with visionary clarity.
