abstract comparisons

I saw two amazing exhibitions on my recent visit to Düsseldorf, will rave about both in separate entries, starting with the one that is still running in case anybody out there gets the idea to go and see it:

Hilma af Klint und Wassily Kandinsky Träume von der Zukunft 16.3. — 11.8.2024

The exhibition at the Kunstsammlung NRW (K20) compares and contrasts the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), who were near contemporaries and developed similar kinds of abstraction at around the same time - but independently of each other. There are all the obvious conclusions to draw from the fact that the male artist was successful in his lifetime whereas the female pendant was discovered long after they both died.

To me personally, the intriguing thing though was the contrast of the very familiar and the unknown. Kandinsky is very much the kind of art I grew up with, seeing the Folkwang Museum and the Kunstsammlung NRW were within daytrip distance. I don't have a record of my childhood exposure, but a lot of his work just looks like home to me. The most recent exhibition of his work I have seen before this one was at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal in 2004: "Wassily Kandinsky: Der Klang der Farbe 1920-1921".

By contrast, I remembered Hilma af Klint's name only because it featured in a recent novel I read, namely Bed bug by Katherine Pancol. This French novel is set mainly in New York and it mentions the 2018/2019 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum which made Hilma af Klint postumously famous. The author couldn't really have known that the show would be such a success, as the novel appeared in the same year when it was on.

Her work very much feels like a foreign country - the colours and shapes are all different from what I'm used to in abstract art, but still it is all very interesting and intriguing. I am wondering how she arrived at all those shapes that are eerily reminiscent of molecular orbitals, long before quantum theory suggested those shapes for the clouds of electrons holding molecules together. There were some very impressive huge format paintings as well, and we overheard a helpful tour guide explaining how she painted those after placing her canvas flat on the floor. Long before Jackson Pollock, as the guide pointed out.

I'm loving the irony that a museum in Stockholm declined to accept her work as a gift in 1970, citing the parallels with Kandinsky as a reason for the rejection. So, well, see for yourself.