The largest number of visitors recorded at New York's Guggenheim Museum was for an exhibition of work by trailblazing Swedish artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint, that had been hidden away for decades. Now the work of this pioneer in abstract art is about to go on show here in Aotearoa. City Gallery Wellington is hosting Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings - "secret" because she left instructions that her work be locked away until at least twenty years after her death. The artist started producing large-scale, brightly-coloured, abstract works in the early 1900s, before her better-known contemporaries like Kandinsky and Mondrian. At the heart of the exhibition is a series called "The Ten Largest" - three-metre high paintings, created for a proposed Temple, that she painted in secret over 10 years. The gallery's Senior Curator Aaron Lister talks to Lynn Freeman about why Hilma asked her family to hide her paintings for so long after her death. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings opens at City Gallery Wellington on December 2.