Above: A section of Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited for the first time at the 0.10 exhibition

By Andrew M. Goldstein
Aug. 16, 2014

Following the developments of Cubist and Futurist painting—in which the natural world was translated into a stark pictorial language of shapes, lines, and angles—Russia was one of the primary breeding grounds of pure abstraction, with Wassily Kandinsky doing much to popularize geometric art before gravitating to the gestural camp in later years. But it was Kazimir Malevich who today is often viewed as the forefather of geometric abstraction, beginning with his seminal 1915 paintings of black shapes—a circle, a square—on a white ground, and his legendary white-square-on-white-canvas 1919 monochrome. Read more...