Hilma af Klint painted for spirits — and century later, the world is finally looking

BUSAN — The origin of modern abstraction has long rested on a handful of towering names: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich. Men whose legacies are etched into museum walls and art history textbooks, whose breakthroughs are hailed as the beginning of it all. But some revolutions bloom in silence. And they wait for history to catch up — even if it takes a century. Several years before Kandinsky painted what he would call “the world’s first-ever abstract picture” in 1911, a Swedish woman named Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was already conjuring ellipses and spirals floating across vibrant fields of color — works that broke free from the visible world and the rules of representational art. Unlike her celebrated male counterparts, however, the swirling cosmologies she began painting in 1906 went virtually unseen. With no audience and no precedent, af Klint worked with only one conviction: that her art was meant for a time beyond her own. In her will, she requested the pieces not be shown until 20 years after her death. But the world still wasn’t ready, and those two decades quietly strWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times