The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman pavilion will be hosting the exhibition project “Kazimir Malevich. Not Only Black Square” devoted to the man who reformed the 20th century’s art, the creator of suprematism, Kazimir Severinov Malevich (1879–1935). The project aims at demonstrating various aspects of the great artist’s work, including those less common in the public impression of the personality and achievements of one of the most significant artists of the last century.
The exhibition will present pictures and graphic works, covering all stages of the artist’s creative life, from his early works of the1900s, futuristic pictures of the 1910s and suprematist compositions to the portraits of the early 1930s, when Malevich turned away from suprematism back to figurative art. The core of the exhibition will be composed of a collection of works from Russian regional museums, where the works of Malevich were sent in the 1920s from the funds of Narkompros museum bureau, which served as the basis to form the Moscow Art Museum and similar museums in other cities of the country. High quality of Malevich’s works stored in the Saratov State Art Museum, the Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum or the Samara Regional Art Museum can, to a large extent, be explained by the artist’s personal choice to sell his best works to state funds.
One of the central motifs of the exhibition will be Malevich’s designs for Victory Over the Sun, the futuristic opera by Mikhail Matyushin and Alexei Kruchenykh. The exposition at the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman will include sketches and costumes created by the artist for the opera. His suprematist period is represented by non-objective compositions, which Malevich himself once chose to be included in the famous Last Futuristic Picture Exhibition “0.10.” Besides this, visitors will get the chance to see the less-known-to-public helio-engravings from the Moscow Arts Theatre Anniversary Album, created by the artist in the early 1910 and his “patriotic popular print” — Malevich’s lithographic posters and postcards, created in the beginning of the First World War (the texts on these prints were composed by Vladimir Mayakovskiy).
The curator is one of the leading researchers of the Russian avant-garde, professor of art history Alexandra Shatskikh, author of works: the art of Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall.
Here is what Alexandra Shatskikh told us about the artist’s phenomenon:
Having become the icon of the 20th century, Malevich’s Black Square partially occulted other aspects of this Russian avant-gardist’s work. However, over the course of his three-decade career, the great artist never stopped working passionately: it was as if a whole army of creators acted under Malevich’s name. He opened up and forged the shape of many spheres of art, thanks to his unique gift of generating new ideas. Even though he was a painter, he conceptualised the futuristic opera Victory Over the Sun (December 1913) which became the cornerstone of radical art. The deafening novelty of the Russian avant-gardist’s works was so beyond the limits of his era, that the public grew up enough to understand them only decades later. This is true not only for the Black Square and suprematistic mono-figures, which anticipated the minimalistic aesthetics of the second half of the 20th century and his mid-1910s pictures, in which he expressed fully formed potential of conceptual art, but also for his late figurative art, until today, seen by the supporters of the traditional art as Malevich’s defeat, the evidence of him renouncing the “fruitless” abstract art.
A massive assortment of documentary materials from state and private funds will accompany the exhibition. Photos, letters, books, diaries, infographics and reconstructions illustrate Malevich’s path as an artist, theoretician and a cultural figure and will unveil new surprising aspects of his personal and artistic life.
The exhibition will include works from the funds of Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Mayakovskiy State Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, Surikov Krasnoyarsk Art Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, the Samara Regional Art Museum, the Radishchev Saratov State Art Museum, the Tula Regional Art Museum, Valery Dudakov and Marina Kashuro’s collection (Moscow), the Sepherot Foundation (Geneva), etc.
LOCATION: The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman pavilion
TIME: November 24, 2017 — February 25, 2018, 11:00 till 20:00
PRICE: Adults — 300 roubles, children from 6 to 16 years, full-time students and pensioners — 100 roubles
Free of charge: children under 6, orphans, abandoned children, people with disabilities, veterans of the Great Patriotic War and members of large families with at least one child under 16.
CURATOR: Alexandra Shatskikh
ASSISTANT CURATOR: Yekaterina Mochalina
ORGANIZER: JSC VDNH
