Argentine Abstract Painter and Art Legend Ides Kihlen Passes Away at 108

Ides Kihlen, the beloved Argentinian abstract painter whose first solo exhibition came at age 85, died on April 14 at age 108. The news of her death was announced by Galería Via Margutta in Córdoba, which has represented the artist since 2012.

From her early arts education as a teenager, Kihlen remained committed to her dual love of painting and music throughout her nine-decade career. Bolstered by a daily routine that entailed painting from the moment she woke up and playing the piano after sunset, her approach to art-making was lyrical and often guided by the unconscious. “I used to half-close my eyes, trying to block my thoughts as if meditating, and then attempt to compose the picture I had envisioned,” Kihlen said. The works that resulted from these musings superimpose geometric forms, experimental line work, and scraps of colored paper on backgrounds that, whether made of canvas, cardboard, or printed musical scores, bleed imperceptibly into the foreground matter.

Born in Argentina’s Santa Fe Province in 1917, Kihlen moved with her family to Buenos Aires as a teenager. At 14, she enrolled in the National School of Decorative Arts, where she studied for seven years while simultaneously furthering her piano education at the National Conservatory. In the decades that followed, she studied with or visited the ateliers of painters, including Emilio Pettoruti and Vicente Puig — who was also her professor — while continuing to paint in an academic, figurative tradition.

Kihlen made a crucial turn to abstraction in the 1960s. “Figuration left me as if it were diluting itself,” she explained. While her style began to approach the rhythmic, almost synesthetic play between painterly form and textural matter for which she is celebrated today, her work remained virtually unknown in the mainstream art world.

But in the decades that followed, that would begin to change. In 2002, the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires mounted a retrospective on Kihlen’s work that, at age 85, doubled as her first-ever solo exhibition. Her career blossomed from then on, and in the years since, her work has been the subject of solo presentations at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and the Emilio Caraffa Fine Arts Museum in Córdoba, as well as galleries throughout the Americas.

The inseparability of Kehlin’s life from her art is often cited in relation to her legacy. “She was elegant and demure, and her art was everywhere,” Isabella Hutchinson, founder of Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary in New York, said in a text conversation with Hyperallergic. “She shared the apartment with her creations, and entering that space was magical.”

Kihlen is survived by her two daughters, Ingrid González Monteagudo and Silvia González Kihlen, who have acted as custodians of her practice in the years since her institutional debut. María de Becerra, director of Vía Margutta Gallery, was introduced to the artist through her daughters, whom she met in 1988, when the three of them worked as international painting dealers. Like many who got to know Kihlen and her work intimately, she began to view their meeting as kismet.

“When I learned that she was born in the same city (Santa Fe) and on the same day, July 10, as I was, and I fell in love with her exceptional work, a bond was formed that resembled a mother-daughter relationship,” the gallerist told Hyperallergic.

With Kihlen’s passing, her family, friends, and the wider contemporary art world have lost a luminary whose unmitigated dedication to expression and creation is increasingly rare. “She was a wonderful being who passed away in absolute peace, surrounded by love,” González Monteagudo told Hyperallergic.

In seeing the flood of recognition and remembrance that has followed in the days since the artist’s death, de Becerra’s words hold an undeniable truth: “For us, she was eternal.”