Kazimir Malevich Abstract artist Bio

Kazimir Malevich biography

Kazimir Malevich was a pioneering Russian painter and creator of the Suprematist movement. His seminal Black Square (1915) and Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), are often cited as some of the earliest abstract paintings ever produced. "The black square on the white area was the first form where the nonobjective feeling came to be expressed," Malevich wrote. "The square = feeling, the snowy area = the emptiness beyond this feeling." Born on February 23, 1878, at Kyiv, Ukraine, he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture where he learned to paint in an impressionistic style. At college, he fell in with the Russian avant-garde group called the Soyuz Molodyozhi, headed by Vladimir Tatlin, and engaged in their group shows. Malevich would temporarily come into a star, with exhibitions throughout Europe, before being condemned as a bourgeois artist from the Stalinist regime.