Hilma AF Klint review, Serpentine Gallery ★★★★★

Blocks of primary colour, geometric shapes, yellow sunbursts, floating orbs, coils. Wandering round the Serpentine's spring exhibition, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the abstracts you encountered were Kandinsky's, or Mondrian's or Malevich's. In fact, these paintings preceded all three - and were painted by a woman.

Though Swedish painter Hilma AF Klimt (1862–1944) was a pioneer of abstract art, she worked in a vacuum, far from the European avant-garde. Her huge, trippy canvases in pastel pinks, burnt orange and dusty blues were a direct departure from the traditional practices she had been taught at Stockholm's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Klint was fascinated by the occult, by the 'invisible forces' that occupied contemporary 'theosophy' - a system of esoteric principles, expounded by figures such as Rudolf Steiner.

Her non-figurative paintings were an attempt to understand these forces - she insisted that the pictures were painted “through” her with a divine dictation: “I had no idea what they were supposed to depict… I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.” Klint conducted seances - a practice that was later dubbed 'automatic drawing' by the Surrealists.

It's hard to know what to make of this show. Are these paintings, which were only discovered in the 1980s, cause to remodel our understanding of art history? Or was Klint simply a peculiar outlier, whose early abstraction was a mere quirk of timing? Some of these paintings look like the kind of hippy-dippy fence-frescoes you see at Glastonbury Festival. Are these oddly timeless canvases early masterpieces? Are they even art?

Hilma AF Klimt: Painting the Unseen demurs on this point - we have to make up our own minds: and you'll be thinking about it for days. Whatever you decide, the show is nothing short of fascinating: head down this spring.