It’s a shame that the two preeminent stars of abstract art—Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky—never met in person. At one point, Swedish-born af Klint and Russian-born Kandinsky were miles apart from each other in Stockholm, where Kandinsky traveled in 1915 for an exhibition. They could have talked about their uncanny similarities, parallel lives and of course, their differences.

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But what if these premiere painters of abstraction actually shared a conversation? What would that dialogue look like? Would one overpower the other?

In “Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future” at the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany, curators Julia Voss and Daniel Birnbaum have constructed a meeting of these creative minds through visual means. It’s the first major museum show exhibiting their works like they were exchanging words: their otherworldly points of intersection as well as their distinct approaches to painting.

Both artists passed away in 1944. At age 45, they produced the marquee paintings in “Dreams of the Future,” both inspired by the spiritual. Nestled in a corner next to Improvisation 10, Composition IV stands........

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