In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World Conference on Spiritual Science in London. It was a moment the 65-year-old Hilma af Klint had waited a long time for, but her confident prediction 20 years earlier that ‘the experiments I have undertaken will astound humanity’ was not fulfilled. So deafening, in fact, was the critical silence that greeted her work that she left instructions for it to remain under wraps until 20 years after her death. The world wasn’t ready for her ‘future pictures’.
Entering the room devoted to Mondrian’s signature grids, you could be in a different exhibition
What a difference a century makes. When the New York Guggenheim took a punt on a solo exhibition of Af Klint’s work in 2018 it attracted more than 600,000 visitors, an attendance record. Now she has been given joint billing at Tate Modern with the greatest and most abstract of abstract painters, Piet Mondrian.
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