Art fair: TEFAF Maastricht 2025: HILLA REBAY : THE REVENGE OF SPIRITUALITY

Hilla Rebay: A forgotten pioneer of Modern Art

Raphaël Durazzo announces its participation in the Showcase section of TEFAF 2025 (15 to 20 March 2025) in Maastricht and the presentation of the graphic work of the pioneer of abstract art Hilla von Rebay (1890-1967).

Hilla von Rebay, visionary artist and curator, is best known for her crucial role in the creation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which she founded and directed as curator. Her graphic work, which she developed in parallel with her curatorial role, is now being rediscovered and recognised as a major influence on the American art scene, both formally and theoretically. Being part of the first wave of abstraction to sweep across the United States. Rebay’s work - which she refused to call abstract in favour of the term Non-Objective Art – is a quest for the spiritual absolute in art, an antidote to the fragmentation of the XXth Century.

She developed a characteristic style, creating for us a meticulously thought-out cosmos in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal.

The selection presented by the gallery at TEFAF expresses the relationship between “rhythm, line, balance and measure” and “the cosmic inner order”. She calls the result “diagram of the soul”: stunning paintings that bear witness to the artist's boundless energy.

From the 1940s onwards, her work on canvas was characterised by centrifugal compositions in which a swirl of lines is crossed by flat geometric shapes. Triangles, squares and circles, the three fundamental shapes of inobjective painting, which she describes as the ultimate manifestations of beauty and “the means of exerting a direct influence on the soul”, like geometric constellations engulfed by vortexes of colour.

Hilla Rebay’s approach, both spiritual and contemplative, gave rise to a new form of geometric abstraction imbued with lyricism. This echoed several decades later in the artists of the Color Field Paintings movement, such as Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, who claimed the meditative effect of flat areas of colour.

Rebay insists on the ‘invisible’ power of paint. This philosophy is reflected in both her painting and her curatorial work. In an immersive and contemplative environment, the muffled rooms of the Musée de l'Art Inobjectif follow one another. Some rooms play music, while others are completely silent. Although the museography was changed forever, the logic of placing the viewer's experience at the heart of the artistic process took root in people's minds, particularly in the minimalist movement that emerged a few years later. Having left no pedagogical trace, Hilla von Rebay's reputation was for a long time limited to her role as a “conduit” for European abstract art to the United States, rather than as a descendant of students or followers in the strict sense of the term. Her own influence is therefore diffuse and subtle rather than straight forward and has yet to be studied.