State Museum of Contemporary Art

The exhibition is dedicated to the centennial of the Black Square, the most seminal work of art in the history of the Russian avant garde, broadly presenting the movement of Suprematism and non-objective art. In the exhibition, one can see works and archival material from the Costakis collection of the State Museum of Contemporary Art which refer to the historic Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10, paintings and drawings by Kazimir Malevich as well as Malevich’s students. The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 opened at the initiative of the artist Ivan Puni at the gallery of Nadezhda Dobitsina in St. Petersburg on December 19, 1915 and lasted one month. The exhibition is important because Kazimir Malevich presented there on two walls for the first time works that illustrated his movement of Suprematism with paintings made of geometric, monochromatic forms. Suprematism was presented as a new aesthetic and philosophical approach to realism in the arts, as the depiction of the unseen part of the world, as non-objectivity, as the zero point of painting and the supremacy of form and color over any other component of painting. In the corner between the two walls, the artist placed, as if it were a religious icon, the Black Square, which is the emblem of Suprematism.