"The world as non-objective. The birth of a new art"

The Yeltsin Center together with the Encyclopedia of Russian Avant-garde will open the exhibition “The World as Non-Objective. The birth of a new art ”. It will be available to visitors from 5.11.2021 to 20.02.2022 in Yekaterinburg at the Yeltsin Center Art Gallery. Curators - Natalia Murray and Andrey Sarabyanov, scientific consulting - Irina Karasik.

The central theme of the exhibition project is the history of one of the brightest periods of Kazimir Malevich’s activity in creating an innovative school of avant-garde art. The exhibition will tell about the development around Malevich’s ideas of the key artistic concept for himself and his associates - Suprematism. From the creation of the Unovis association ("Hardeners of the New Art") at the Vitebsk Art School, where Malevich was invited to teach in 1919, to post-suprematism in the difficult 1930s.

The treatise "The World as Non-Objective", written by Kazimir Malevich in 1921-1922, summed up more than ten years of the artist’s pictorial evolution. Suprematism became one of the foundations of the avant-garde, globally determined the path of its development, made it unique and inimitable, and for the master’s students and followers, the theory of non-objectivity has become a kind of religion.

An important source of information about the origin and development of the Suprematist utopia is the diaries of Malevich’s student, artist Lev Yudin, first published as a book by Irina Karasik in 2017 “Lev Yudin. Say - yours… ". This and other historical documents formed the basis of the exhibition and made it possible to build a multi-layered picture of creative ups and downs, as well as searches and contradictions through which the master himself and his followers went.

It is through the prism of the diary of Lev Yudin, one of the most loyal followers of Malevich, that the curators of the exhibition recreate the evolution of Suprematism, show the path along which the artist and his students traveled from Vitebsk to Petrograd. A journey that spanned only a decade and a half, and full of great artistic achievements and discoveries.

The exposition will present three periods - from the Vitebsk art school to the founding of Unovis and the growth of its popularity from 1919 to 1921, then the Petrograd period of the creation of the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Ginkhuk, 1922) and scientific work at the institute under the leadership of Kazimir Malevich, and the final the period after the closure of Ginkhuk in 1926, when Suprematism and other avant-garde movements became the object of accusations of formalism and were supplanted by official Soviet art.

Based on the study of historical documents, the curators trace the formal and informal ties of the artists. With the help of photographs, quotes and pages from Lev Yudin’s diary, the exhibition seeks to fill the factual gaps, detail the idea of the "Malevich circle" and, through the work of the people who entered it, describe the problems of artistic processes of the 1920s-1930s.

The exhibition brings together 84 works from the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum. Pushkin, the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, the Vyatka Art Museum, the Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, the Tomsk Regional Art Museum, the Yaroslavl Art Museum, the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, the Research Museum at the Russian Academy of Arts, the Sepherot Foundation (Liechtenstein), the U-ART Foundation, collections of Roman Babichev, Elena Kurchenko, Vladimir Tsarenkov.

Artists whose works will be on display: Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich, Lev Yudin, Konstantin Rozhdestvensky, Anna Leporskaya, Ilya Chashnik, Nikolai Suetin, El Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva, Mikhail Veksler, Pavel Filonov, Robert Falk, Dmitry Sannikov, Ivan Gavris other.

In 1919, the Fine Arts Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education sent Vera Ermolaeva to Vitebsk as a teacher at the People’s Art School, which was later transformed into the Vitebsk Art-Practical Institute. In 1921, after leaving the post of M. Chagala, she became the rector of this institute. Soon she invited Malevich to teach at the Institute. Together with Malevich and his students, Ermolaeva participated in the organization of Unovis.

In the second half of the 1920s, a small collective was formed around Ermolaeva, called the "group of pictorial-plastic realism", the core of which were former Ginkhuk collaborators - L. Yudin, K. Rozhdestvensky, V. Sterligov, K. I. M. Ender. In contrast to the social. realism, plastic realism combined elements of realistic and abstract art.

In the early 1930s, Ermolaeva worked on a series of paintings "Boy", "Sportsmen" and "Village". The influence of Malevich’s post-suprematism is felt in them - non-objectiveness, dissolved in figurativeness. The “village” series most fully embodied the search for the artist’s later work - experiments in the field of new subject painting. The gouaches "Woman with a child" and "Woman with a rake and a child" amaze with their powerful coloristic splendor, strong and spontaneous sense of color. The energetic color shading of the shape creates a sense of the weight of the objects. There are some hidden relationships between the characters. The effect of weight arises when the ratio of an overweight female figure and a fragile child figure.

The paintings of K. Malevich of the late period are stylistically diverse. Among them, the "half-images" created by him are especially acutely perceived - faceless torsos and figures. Such works evoke associations with the plasticity of archaic sculpture, and with a wooden toy, and with a modernist mannequin. There is a certain pristine purity in the plasticity of the depicted torsos, so clearly reminiscent of the nude compositional scheme of the icon: it is felt both in the expressive grace of the contours and in the intriguing mystery of the ovals. The obsessive facelessness of the images captured in the "torsos" presupposes the solution to the pictorial allegory. This is probably due to the disturbing thoughts of K. Malevich, who observed how the program of "depersonalization" of the nation was consistently implemented in the new Russia. The work is distinguished by an exciting expression of color,the monumentality of the generalized interpretation of the figure. These faceless peasants of K. Malevich are majestic and tragic in their "cosmic" loneliness.

This composition is a dynamic pairing of colored geometric shapes. Crossing each other, existing in harmony, they are the "letters" of the universal language invented by Malevich - Suprematism. Malevich’s Suprematism as a direction develops the idea of finding the supremus of the supra-personal essence of art. The "constructions" that make up the composition of the painting are depicted floating in the white space of the background, which, according to the artist, personifies the infinity of the Universe. There is no top or bottom in the picture, there is not even a hint of narrative. The artist creates a different, "new" reality, a kind of "thing in itself", the existence of which is limited by the framework of the canvas.

A significant part of the creative life of N.M.Suetin, one of Malevich’s faithful students and associates, was associated with the industrial production of porcelain. In this area of artistic work, he left a legacy that was named "Suprematist Porcelain". In porcelain, the Suprematists dreamed of materializing one of the romantic ideas of their theory - the idea of transforming the modern objective world and thereby bringing Suprematism into a three-dimensional environment.

Suetin came to the porcelain factory in Petrograd together with Malevich and Chashnik. From December 1922, with interruptions, he remained there until the last days of his life, worked as an artist-composer, and in 1932 took the post of artistic director.

By the time Malevich’s group arrived, a favorable creative atmosphere had developed at the plant. According to one of his contemporaries, the plant played the role of an "experimental field" for everyone who wanted to move from "pure" art to production, "making things."

In this service, the artist makes an attempt to combine several pictorial compositions into a single plastic system. In this case, the unifying principle is the movement, transmitted, as in a relay race, from composition to composition.

The most successful fragments of the legendary design of Vitebsk of 1920-1921 are associated with the name of Suetin - projects of stands, sketches for painting walls and tram cars, projects of signage. The artist’s organic sense of harmony and rhythm allowed him to build compositions with a special artistry using a circle, a square and colored rectangular "plates" (the well-known "Suprematist set") - and to achieve the necessary new, dynamic sound every time.

The path to Suprematism for Suetin, as for many, began with a purposeful, persistent desire to understand the logic of Malevich’s innovative system. Unlike his younger fellow students, Suetin was far from a novice artist already in Vitebsk. He had his own idea of modern trends in art, and the experience of turning to Cubism, to non-objective painting. A deep understanding of the theory of Suprematism and a practical analysis of Malevich’s works helped Suetin avoid light and superficial imitation, based on a certain set of simple geometric shapes, deliberately avoiding the involuntary stylization that seduced less experienced artists.

A catalog has been prepared for the exhibition, published with the financial support of the Malevich Society. Articles for the catalog were written by Christina Lodder, Andrey Sarabyanov, Natalia Murray, Irina Karasik, Tatiana Goryacheva.