The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires is very proud to pay homage to Ides Kihlen (Santa Fe, 1917), whose painting, thought and artistic curiosity spanned almost the entirety of the 20th century, absorbing trends from each period in turn but also finding her own language. Her style is heavily influenced by her love of music, which played an important role in her life and offers the key to understanding her rhythms and silences.
The artist composes abstract forms featuring a personal repertoire of geometric shapes, numbers and musical notes. The power of her work lies in this on-going dialogue between painting and music and an insatiable playfulness that never lost its vibrancy.
Throughout her life, Ides has reimagined the possibilities of painting, rejecting the academic codes she learned at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Decorativas de la Nación, where she studied under the directorship of Pío Collivadino. Her subsequent interest in abstract art led her to Emilio Perotutti, Juan Batlle Planas and Kenneth Kemble, whose workshops she attended at different times in her life.
For decades, she remained on the margins of the art scene, working in the privacy of her studio at the home where she lived for most of her life. In 2000 she started to exhibit her work at art fairs, galleries and artistic institutions in Argentina and overseas.
Ides Kihlen in 1932, she entered the School of Decorative Arts of the Nation and, at the same time, the Carlos López Buchardo National Conservatory. In Paris she studied at André Lothe’s studio and, upon his return to the country, he attended the Ernesto De la Cárcova School of Fine Arts.
