kazimir malevich

In his artistic practice, Malevich rejected representational imagery and the depiction of the real world. He asserted that pure form, in and of itself, is capable of generating aesthetic experience. The artist saw the central task of his work in revealing the inner potential of painting’s formal elements and in exploring the fundamental possibilities of color and composition. Kazimir Malevich’s most famous work is Black Square, which became a symbol of modernism as a whole and marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of painting. For Malevich, Black Square represented a kind of “zero of form,” in which the entire history of painting appears to be reduced to a single point. At the same time, Malevich’s artistic legacy is not limited to Suprematism: over the course of his career, he worked in Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism, and toward the end of his life even returned to a realistic manner. Today, works by the great artist are held in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Interested in the history of abstract art? Explore the collection of digital reproductions of works by Kazimir Malevich on our website and acquire a copy of one of his celebrated works.