Kazimir Malevich

 

Kazimir Malevich was born on the 23rd of February 1879 and died on the 15th May 1935 was a Russian painter and art theoretician. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde, Supremacists movement.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH BIOGRAPHY


Malevich was born in Ukraine to parents of Polish origin, who moved continuously within the Russian Empire in search of work.

Kazimir was the first of fourteen children.

His father took jobs in a sugar factory and in railway construction, where young Kazimir was also employed in his early teenage years.

He spent most of his childhood in the villages of Ukraine, amidst sugar-beet plantations, far from centers of culture. Until age twelve he knew nothing of professional artists, although art had surrounded him in childhood. He was happy in village, and in decorated walls and stoves

Without any particular encouragement from his family, Malevich started to draw around the age of 12. With his mind set firmly on an artistic career, Malevich attended a number of art schools in his youth, starting at the Kiev School of Art in 1895.


KAZIMIR MALEVICH KEY IDEAS:

Malevich worked in a variety of styles, but he is mostly known for his contribution to the formation of a true Russian avant-garde post-World War I through his own unique attitude of observation and painting, which he termed Supremacist. He invented this term because he believed that art should transcend subject matter the truth of shape and color should reign 'supreme' over the image or narrative.

More radical than the Cubists or Futurists, at the same time that his Supremacist compositions proclaimed that paintings were composed of flat, abstract areas of paint, they also served up powerful and multi-layered symbols and mystical feelings of time and space.  

 


DEATH

Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad on 15 May 1935. On his deathbed he was exhibited with the black square above him, and mourners at his funeral people carried a black square.

His ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near his dacha. Nikolai Suetin, a friend of Malevich’s and a fellow artist, designed a white cube with a black square to mark the burial site.

BLACK & WHITE Squares

 

In terms of his black and white squares, he overlaps them and this inspired me to increase my flexibility of ideas by adjusting the size and scale of my own boxes. I rotated some of the black and white boxes, experimenting with size too to create what I feel is a kite shape. This meant my work took on the feel of an optical illusion, particularly with the inclusion of black  and white squares round the outside which act as helping the viewer to feel as if they're stepping into the kite. These squares also act as a border and help the focus of the eye towards the centre of the kite squares, making the image more exciting.