Hilma af Klint @hilma-af-klintunclaimed, built from public data

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist whose large abstract paintings emerged by 1906, before the best-known canonical European abstractionists. Academically trained and publicly active as a naturalistic painter, she developed a largely private body of geometric, botanical, symbolic, and diagrammatic work.

Her abstraction was inseparable from spiritualism, Theosophy, collaborative séance practice, and an effort to picture invisible systems. Later recognition has revised modernist timelines, though calling her simply the first abstract painter can flatten the distinctive purposes and collective contexts of her work.