The Century Overtaken

In 1906, Hilma af Klint painted exceptionally audacious abstract canvases – spirals, circles, flat planes of vibrant color, organic motifs of rare visionary power. Kandinsky had not yet produced his first abstract watercolor. Malevich had not yet imaginedhis Black Square. Hilma af Klint, however, had already invented everything. And nobody knew it.

This is the dizzying paradox at the heart of this landmark exhibition – the first major monograph devoted to the Swedish artist in France. Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, 27, 28af Klint led a double artistic life: conventional in public, radically avant-garde in secret. Nourished by her involvement in the Theosophical Society and séances with a group of women sharing a utopian vision, she drew from the invisible forces of the world a formal freedom that her male contemporaries would only achieve years later. Yet she chose to show nothing.

Her will stipulated that her abstract works must remain sealed for twenty years after her death. It was only in 1986, in Los Angeles, that they were presented to the general public for the first time. A century of silence, almost. What the Grand Palais is exhibiting today is his magnum opus: the cycle of "Temple Paintings" (1906-1915), including the monumental series of the Ten Largest—some canvases reaching over three meters in height—presented for the first time in France. Works that seem to engage in a dialogue with our era as much as with their own time: between art, science, and spirituality, between geometry and mysticism, between the intimate and the universal.

The exhibition poses a disturbing question: how could art history have ignored an artist of this stature for so long? The answer, implicitly, reveals everything about how female genius has been erased, minimized, forgotten. Hilma af Klint is not a rediscovery – she is a restoration.

GRAND PALAIS
From May 6 to August 30, 2026
17 avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008
Metro Franklin D. Roosevelt (Line 9)
Tue. to Sun. 10am-7:30pm, Fri. until late 10 PM
Closed on Mondays
Price: €15 - Reduced price: €12 - Free for under 18s