Suprematist Composition No.56, 1916 - Canvas Print

In the heady days just one year before the Russian Revolution, the figurehead of the Russian avant-garde, Kazimir Malevich gave birth to what would become a decisive moment in the history of abstraction, the style known as Suprematism. The artist is now remembered for playing a crucial role in the evolution of modern art comparable to that of Kandinsky or Mondrian. In 1915, in Petrograd, Malevich introduced his famous Black Square on White Background, and with it ushered in the framework of a new visual lexicon. In addressing abstraction, he fixed his attention on the relationship between form and the space that surrounds it, thus creating a tension that seems to vibrate across the canvas. Malevich desired his art reach the essence, elusiveness, and shapelessness of a form of perfect expression, which he named 'supreme'. A stunning example of theory put into practice "Suprematist Composition No.56", painted in 1916, is like a city map or birds-eye view of a utopian metropolitan space, showing the architectural forms that shape daily life. These combinations of rectangular shapes were indeed at the root of many architectural projects that Malevich himself was involved in. During the short-lived days of post-revolutionary exuberance, Malevich aimed to translate the complex facets of Supremacist into architectural and urban planning. These magnificent 'zero forms' that the artist had first achieved with his Black Square on White Background managed to articulate for the first time a purely pictorial phenomenon, creating a visual language independent from the confines of figurative representation.