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Malevich – the founder of suprematist art

Malevich pioneered geometric painting, and the works that have survived are still surprising for their simplicity all these years later. He is considered the great pioneer of abstract painting in the twentieth century. With his enigmatic works, he sketched out another bright star for the 20th century art world, heralding the dawn of various art movements, from Dadaism to the later Minimalism. He opened up an infinite horizon for art to be explored and wandered by those who came after him.

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Suprematism was a sign of the end of the era of traditional painting, and he was almost alone in the entire Suprematist art group.

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Suprematist paintings completely abandoned the semantic and descriptive components of painting, as well as the presentation of the picture in three dimensions. Those flat geometric shapes do not have the slightest sense of volume or depth. In Malevich’s works, the geometric compositions are free and spontaneous, creating a sense of rotational or centrifugal movement in the picture, which may be related to the influence of Futurism and Radialism. Moreover, there is an expressive quality in Malevich’s paintings that is not present in the cold, neutral “Black Square on a White Background” abstraction of Mondrian. For Malevich, a square has a unique expressive personality in itself, and all elements of its own expressive character are excluded from the painting, the entire focus of the composition being a system of right angles without any emotional element.

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Malevich’s early works reveal almost the entirety of the painter’s own educational journey, reflecting the evolution of Western painting from Impressionism to Futurism in the previous 30 years. Malevich incorporates a more local inspiration derived from Russian iconography, the “primitive peasant” art with its primitivist purity of color and simplicity of form.

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