Kazimir Malevich at Tate Modern, London

Malevich
Tate Modern, London
16 July – 26 October 2014

Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) was a radical, mysterious and hugely influential figure in modern art, who lived and worked through one of the most turbulent periods in twentieth century history. Tate Modern will present the first major Malevich retrospective for almost twenty-five years. This groundbreaking exhibition will draw on the world’s greatest collections of his work to offer an expansive view of his career in its entirety.

Having come of age in Tsarist Russia, Malevich witnessed the October Revolution first-hand. His early experiments as a painter led him towards the cataclysmic invention of Suprematism, a bold visual language of abstract geometric shapes and stark colours, epitomised by the Black Square. A definitively radical gesture, it was revealed to the world after months of secrecy and was hidden again for almost half a century after its creator’s death. It sits on a par with Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ as a game-changing moment in twentieth century art and continues to inspire and confound viewers to this day.

Starting from his early paintings of Russian landscapes, agricultural workers and religious scenes, visitors will see Malevich’s journey towards abstract painting and his iconic Suprematist compositions, including almost all the surviving paintings from the legendary 0.10 exhibition. The show will explore his collaborative involvement with architecture and theatre, including his designs for the avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. The exhibition will also follow his temporary abandonment of painting in favour of teaching and writing, and his much-debated return to figurative painting in later life.

Malevich’s work tells a fascinating story about the dream of a new social order, the successes and pitfalls of revolutionary ideals, and the power of art itself. This exhibition will, for the first time, offer visitors a chance to trace his groundbreaking developments not only through well-known masterpieces but also through earlier and later work, sculpture, design objects, and rarely-seen prints and drawings.

Tate Modern’s exhibition is made possible by a unique collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum and Khardzhiev Foundation in Amsterdam and the Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, enriched with key loans from public and private collections around the world, including the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; MoMA, New York; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. It will also bring together the largest number of Malevich’s works on paper ever to be displayed. Unprecedented in scope, the exhibition will shed new light on his career, from his participation in the quest for a new society to his confrontation with the Stalinist regime.

Malevich is curated at Tate Modern by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Head of Exhibitions and Iria Candela, Curator, International Art, with Fiontan Moran, Assistant Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery. It is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, with each venue presenting different aspects of Malevich’s remarkable career from October 2013 to October 2014.

TATE MODERN
www.tate.org.uk

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism in the Ludwig Collection, Cologne

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism in the Ludwig Collection - Project series on the Russian Avant-Garde Part 2 
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
5 February - 22 August 2010 - 20 February 2011

After the exhibition “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Cubo-Futurism and the Rise of Modernism in Russia” Museum Ludwig continued its project series on the Russian avant-garde with a cabinet exhibition of its Malevich collection. This is one of the largest collections worldwide of KASIMIR MALEVICH’s work and was exhibited for the first time in nearly twenty years. The approximately fifty graphic works, four paintings and one sculpture from all periods of his work afforded viewers an insight into the artist's development from figurative art to abstraction and back again to figuration. As part of the exhibition preparations, museum restorers subjected the four paintings to an art-technological examination. Ten suprematist works by artists from Kasimir Malevitch’s circle, Ekaterina Bugrova, Ivan Kliun, Nina Kogan, Liubov Popova, Kliment Redko, Nikolai Suetin and Ilya Chashnik, complements the exhibition and demonstrate Kasimir Malevich’s influence on his contemporaries.

The concept of Suprematism denotes both abstract composition using pure shapes as well as Malevich’s own theory of pure abstraction in art; for him, this implies “everything that goes beyond what has to this date been created in art”.

The focal point of this exhibition was the presentation of the two paintings from his Suprematist period, “Supremus No. 38” from 1916 and “Suprematist Composition” from 1915. The latter underwent substantial restoration for the exhibition and both paintings were subjected to an art-technological examination. The findings were comprehensively documented as part of the exhibition.

On the basis of the results of the examinations carried out (UV, infrared, X-ray) and based upon the history of the paintings (exhibitions; change of owner; earlier restoration measures), the state of preservation of the paintings as they are today, and also how they were created, were rendered visible. From detailed close-ups, the viewers learn how to spot certain traits of painting technique like, for example, surface structures and brush strokes – but also the impact restoration can have on the appearance of the paintings. In preparation the exhibition, also numerous works on paper by Kasimir Malevich were restored.

Like the paintings in the collection, the drawings by Kasimir Malevich too stem from various periods of his work, from his beginnings around 1903 to his famous invention and development of (abstract) Suprematism all the way to his return to figuration. This change of course in his later work has only recently become the subject of art historical research. The extensive Ludwig Collection is ideally suited to the exploration of abstraction as well as figuration. The exhibition gave a better undertanding of the development of Malevich’s work. The confrontation of his early concrete works with his later ones makes a unique comparison possible.

With over 800 works, the Museum Ludwig is home to one of the world’s largest collections of the Russian avant-garde. In May 2009, a series of exhibitions started which highlights new aspects of the collection and its main emphases. The series goes hand in hand with intensive research into the techniques used in the works, the picture frames and the dates.

Curator of the series is Katia Baudin, the deputy director of Museum Ludwig, with Emily Joyce Evans acting as assistant curator. Petra Mandt worked on the art technological examinations and their documentation.

A catalogue which documents the complete findings of the art technological examinations and features further scholarly essays on Kasimir Malevich was published with the support of the Friends of the Wallraf Richartz Museum and the Museum Ludwig e.V.

Museum Ludwig Cologne
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Cologne - Germany
www.museum-ludwig.de