During the summer of 2013, Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof showed a retrospective of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a pioneer of abstract art, who began creating abstract works as early as 1906.
The exhibition showed around 200 of Hilma af Klint’s most important works and paintings and works on paper never shown before. The artist did not present her abstract works publicly during her lifetime. According to her will, they were only to be made public twenty years after her death, because she assumed that her contemporaries were not in the position to grasp their significance. It was only in the 1980s that her abstract works were finally exhibited and honored for the first time. Despite her significant contribution to the history of abstract art, Hilma af Klint’s oeuvre remains largely unknown. The exhibition, also shown in Stockholm and Málaga, offered a unique survey of the creations by the outstanding artist.
