Tracey Bashkoff
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
Summary
An edifying overview of Hilma af Klint, whose life and work has enabled us to understand the history of modernist painting in new, vital ways. In the early years of the 20th century, Hilma af Klint created a remarkable body of work that was both of its time and ahead of it. Her break from the dominant painting style of the day was informed by a variety of new, particularly modern developments from the syncretic modes of spirituality to the discovery of the electron to the theory of evolution. Her interest in so many paradigm-shifting ideas, along with her own willingness to reject restrictive norms of all sorts, enabled her to imagine a radical approach to painting that is stunning in its prescience.
Tracey Bashkoff
Tracey Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to numerous special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She has organized collection-based exhibitions for the museum since 1997 including Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim (2012), and The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910–1918 (2011). In 2008–9, she co-organized the international retrospective Kandinsky, which traveled to Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, before being presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her most recent exhibitions include Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-30 (2024-25), Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (2018-19), and Agnes Martin (2016-17). For the Deutsche Guggenheim, she organized the commissions and presentations of works by Hiroshi Sugimoto and John Baldessari, as well as the exhibitions On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, and James Turrell and Chillida/Tàpies: Matter and Visual Thought. Bashkoff has managed presentations of the Guggenheim Foundation’s permanent holdings at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao since its inauguration, including Louise Bourgeois; Process and Materiality in Art at the Mid-Twentieth Century; Kandinsky in Context; American Color Field Painting; and Passages: Beuys, Darboven, Kiefer, Richter. Bashkoff completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. In 2014, she was a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership.