Suprematism

Suprematism was an abstract art movement pioneered by Kazimir Malevich in Russia in the early 20th century. Suprematist paintings featured simple geometric shapes such as circles, squares and crosses in limited colors. Malevich aimed to develop an entirely abstract visual language devoid of references to the material world.
Suprematism was inspired in part by Russian Futurism’s interest in abstraction and rejection of past artistic traditions. But Malevich took abstraction further with his theory of “non-objective” geometric compositions meant to achieve a transcendent purity of form alone. His Black Square (1915) represented a pivotal rejection of visual conventions in favor of the spiritual possibilities of pure abstraction.
Suprematism reflected Russian avant-garde’s utopian ambitions to revolutionize art and culture following the Bolshevik Revolution. The movement influenced later De Stijl, Bauhaus and hard-edge abstract art. But Suprematism was marginalized under Stalin’s authoritarian regime which promoted Social Realism.
At its best, Suprematist art aimed to liberate painting from the constraints of visual reality into the pure rhythms, tensions and harmonies of color and form alone. The squared shapes and jarring compositions of Suprematism sought to awaken vision from its familiar habits into radical acts of seeing as acts of freedom – unbound from the weight of worldly comprehension into lightness of being where meaning ends and pure revelation or play of plastic invention takes wing.
Though now historical, Suprematism shaped abstract art’s creative and metaphoric possibilities. Its vision endures wherever the simplest elements of color and form in harmonic interrelation or dynamic tension transcend the particular to gesture at deeper springs of beauty, balance and meaning’s very source.