Wessie du Toit reflects on the exhibition Hilma af Klint Painting the Unseen at the Serpentine Gallery, London on view through May 15, 2016.

Du Toit writes: "Ultimately, though, the greatest value of art-historical anomalies like af Klint does not stem from their elusiveness, nor from their canon-defying dates … It is that their work tends to make us abandon the generic lenses we habitually apply to art. To call af Klint abstract, for instance, is a category error, since she was independent of this discourse. Such perspective must be a good thing, even if it leaves us without much to say."