Born in 1917 in Santa Fe, Argentina, Ides Kihlen lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Her childhood was spent on the banks of the Paraná River in the Argentine provinces of Corrientes and Chaco. Painting has been a constant in Kihlen’s life, as has her passion for music. After moving to Buenos Aires, she enrolled at the Escuela de Artes Decorativas (The National School of Decorative Arts), giving rein to a vocation that she still enthusiastically continues to indulge to this day at the age of 105. For more than a decade, Kihlen was Professor Vicente Puig’s favorite student at the School of Decorative Arts.

She later continued her learning by visiting other artists’ studios (including Emilio Pettoruti, Batlle Planes, and André Lhote’s in Paris); pursuing a degree in Art History; and frequenting museums around the world.
However, despite her insatiable desire for knowledge, her own unique work developed independently of global artistic trends. Kihlen’s artistic process is an eloquent expression of her personality. Above all else, she insists on being true to her own internal pace. For long periods, she was more interested in the production of art than in obtaining specific artistic results. She did not consider herself to be a professional artist and as such never attempted to forge a career as an artist. She simply was an artist, and that was enough for her. Furthermore, Kihlen has destroyed much of her work and, for the most part, has neither titled nor dated her paintings. As a result, Kihlen did not emerge onto the Buenos Aires art scene until after she was sixty years old.

While her acrylics and collages are mostly abstract and non-figurative, many of the artist’s works contain references to music and lyrical compositions, such as the inclusion of hovering keyboard-like forms, clefs, and staves. Her choice of color palette is both reserved and vibrant. Her formal compositions oscillate between exuding a lively, playful energy through the incorporation of geometric fragments, patterning, and numerical traces, and presenting windows of negative space that open up into new dimensions where forms float freely across the works’ surface.
Art critic Mercedes Casanegra commented that art and everyday activities are intertwined and inseparable in Kihlen’s life; that painting and drawing are languages that connect the artist to life in a poetic manner. Kihlen’s practice can be considered her spiritual backbone. To this very day, the artist’s ascetic lifestyle flows in tandem with her work.