Collection: Kazimir Malevich   1879 - 1935  Follow artist

Malevich, born 1879, was a Russian painter and art theorist who founded the avant-garde abstract movement of Suprematism and was one of the foremost pioneers of geometric art. Born in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian empire, his family were in fact Polish, though he spoke both languages and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture before founding Suprematism in 1915 at the start of WWI.

The Suprematist movement – characterized by unprecedented bold geometric shapes with interrelating proportions – was hugely controversial, and when the Lenin and Trotsky fell from power and the Stalinist regime began, Malevich’s art was lablled ‘bourgeois’, confiscated and ultimately banned from display. After his death in 1935, his most ground-breaking work, the black square, was hung above his deathbed and mourners were permitted to wave black square banners at his funeral.