Malevich called his invention Suprematism — the supremacy of pure feeling over the depiction of objects — and staged its arrival with a now-legendary 1915 exhibition in Petrograd, where his paintings hung high in the corner of the room, in the position traditionally reserved in Russian homes for religious icons. This was not modesty. Malevich believed he had discovered a new sacred geometry for a new century.
The forms here — a handful of colored planes set adrift on a white field said to represent infinite space — feel almost weightless, more diagram than picture. A century later, the effect remains startlingly modern: it reads as entirely at home in a loft, against raw concrete and steel, or anywhere design has stripped itself back to first principles.
c. 1916 · Oil on canvas, fine-art reproduction · Original held at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Limited · Hand-numbered · Certificate of authenticity
