The Woman Who Invented Abstract Art Before the Boys? She Finally Made It to Asia. Tokyo, Meet Hilma af Klint.
For decades, the art history textbooks told us Kandinsky and Mondrian invented abstract painting. Cute story. Completely wrong.
Hilma af Klint was creating radical, mystical, mind-bending abstract works years before those guys even picked up a brush — but because she was a woman, a mystic, and frankly too weird for the establishment, her work was hidden away until the 1980s. Her 2018 Guggenheim retrospective broke attendance records with over 600,000 visitors. Now, her first major Asian exhibition has arrived at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
Hilma af Klint: The Beyond features 140 works — all making their Japan debut. The centerpiece? The Ten Largest(1907), a series of ten paintings, each over three meters tall, depicting the stages of human life from childhood to old age in swirling, cosmic abstraction. Standing in front of them feels like being inside someone’s spiritual awakening. It’s overwhelming in the best way.
The exhibition traces her journey from traditional landscape painter to occult explorer, diving into her involvement with spiritualism, séances, and a secret group of women called “The Five” who conducted experiments in automatic drawing. Yes, she was basically running an all-female mystic art collective in early 1900s Stockholm. Iconic.
Curated by Kenjin Miwa, the show runs through June 15 and is organized in five chapters exploring everything from her academic training to her obsession with systematizing the invisible. Her notebooks alone are worth the trip — meticulous diagrams of spiritual concepts that look like they could be tech startup wireframes.
Why it matters: Hilma af Klint rewrites art history. She was there first. She was bolder. And now Asia finally gets to see why.
