CategoriesStyles and Movements
Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich's abstract art of flat geometric shapes floating on white, launched in Russia in 1915.
188 works · 8 related artists
About
A black square on white, a tilted red square, bars drifting at angles through white space: Suprematist paintings reduce the picture to flat geometric shapes that seem free of gravity. Kazimir Malevich unveiled the approach in Petrograd in the winter of 1915–16 at the exhibition 0.10, hanging Black Square (1915) high across a corner of the room, where a Russian home placed its icons. He wanted painting to convey pure feeling, not objects, and later took the idea to the edge of disappearance in Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918).
Olga Rozanova, Ivan Kliun, Nadezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova worked in the style, and at the Vitebsk art school, where he arrived in 1919, Malevich formed the collective UNOVIS with followers including Nikolai Suetin and El Lissitzky. They applied Suprematist forms to posters, porcelain, textiles and architectural models, and Lissitzky's Proun works carried the language to Germany in the 1920s.
