For the first time in Italy, a large hall will welcome the re-edition of La Vittoria sul Sole, the first total work of music, art, poetry and theater, created by Malevic with Michail Matjusin and Aleksej Krucenych.
Open until 7 January 2016, the GAMeC - Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo hosts a retrospective dedicated to Kazimir Malevich (Kiev, 1878 – Leningrad/St. Petersburg, 1935), a central and irreplaceable figure of modern art, who went through one of the most intense historical-artistic periods of the twentieth century.
Curated by Eugenia Petrova – deputy director of the State Russian Museum of St. Petersburg, and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio – director of the GAMeC of Bergamo, co-produced by the GAMeC and GAmm – Giunti Arte museum exhibitions, in collaboration with the State Russian Museum of St. Petersburg , the exhibition, unique in its kind for completeness and for the accurate historical-critical investigation, will welcome about 70 works by Malevic alongside a large body of works by important Russian exponents, belonging to the artistic movements of the early twentieth century, as well as documents and videos relating to the historical period of reference.
The initiative takes place one hundred years after the birth of Suprematism, the most radical of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century of which Malevic was the founder, leader, and greatest interpreter. After the exhibition at the Tate in London in 2014 – in which some of the works visible also in GAMeC were exhibited – in October the Bergamo museum celebrates this important anniversary, coinciding with the appointment of the Beyeler Foundation in Basel which will propose the reconstruction of the Suprematist room from 1915.
Malevich is internationally considered part of the pioneering triad that opened the new paths of XNUMXth century art: if Picasso contributed most to the renewal of the figurative tradition and Duchamp to the conceptual one, Malevich is the one who gave birth to the hegemony of the tradition of abstract art, still decisive today.
His was, and continues to be, a key personality for the last century, thanks to a complex production that goes beyond just abstract work and the birth of Suprematism, a fundamental artistic current for the development of XNUMXth century art.
Malevich, in fact, is an artist with multiple facets; after a symbolist and neo-impressionist debut, which reconsidered the conquests of art established in Paris towards the end of the XNUMXth century, he embraced the development of Cubofuturism, a movement that synthesized the conquests of French Cubism by Braque and Picasso and Italian Futurism by Balla and Boccioni. His was an initial path common to other Russian artists of his age, such as Kandinsky, with whom he participated in the first avant-garde collectives.
The exhibition itinerary opens with Malevich's symbolist period, from the paintings depicting landscapes with rows of trees from 1906 to the famous self-portrait with a red bow from 1907, which does not seem to ignore the lesson of the Fauves. These works will be related to those, chronologically earlier, by the symbolist master Ilya Repin, and with contemporary ones by Natalia Goncarova, Whitewashing of the canvas (1908), and by Mikhail Yakovlev, Holygrove (Female figures in the garden. Praying) (1904- 1907).
We continue with an in-depth section relating to the 1913s, at the beginning of which – precisely in XNUMX – Malevic drafted, together with other artists, the Manifesto of the First Futurist Congress.
For the first time in Italy, a large hall will welcome the re-edition of La Vittoria sul Sole, the first total work of music, art, poetry and theater, created by Malevic with Michail Matjusin and Aleksej Krucenych, in which the seeds of Suprematism are visible, with a first mention of the Black Square.
This work, performed only once in 1913, was philologically recomposed on the original drawings by Malevich – present in the exhibition – on the music and texts found in the archives, where they had been buried during the years of the regime, and on the few existing photographic images.
To this period belong the famous paintings, all exhibited, such as Cow and Violin (1913), Perfect Portrait of Ivan Kljun (1913), Composition with La Gioconda (1914) and some drawings from the same years compared with the canvases Malorossy (Ukrainians ) (1912) by David Burliuk, Composition with an Accordion (1914) by Jean Pougny, Cyclist (1913) by Natalia Goncarova and others.
The years follow in which, on the occasion of the Last 0.10 Futurist Exhibition of 1915, Malevic launches Suprematism, with the intention of affirming the dominance of the pure sensibility of art which will find application not only in painting, but also in architecture and design , especially at the level of experimentation and modeling.
In this section you can admire masterpieces such as the Red Square (1915) and the contemporary Suprematism (1915-1916) or even his most recognized work, the Black Square, together with Black Circle and Black Cross (1923). The 1915s represent a period of maximum theoretical expansion for Malevic, who abandons "the matted brush for the sharp pen" and devotes himself to writings, notes, drawings. It is in this decade that the Suprematist nucleus will be concentrated, revealing a much more advanced research than that which transpires from the works of other colleagues, such as Portrait of a Philosopher. Cubist construction (XNUMX) by Lyubov Popova or Suprematism by Olga Rozanova. In addition, some Russian icons from the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries will be exhibited, documenting how much Malevic drew inspiration from them.
Alongside Malevic's pictorial works, examples of his production linked to design and architecture will also be presented, testifying to the idea of total avant-garde art aimed at eliminating the boundaries between art and life. Among these, the Architektony models from the 1919s that transmit the utopia of the future city imagined at the time, the enamelled paintings on porcelain and the canvas projects for fabrics with a Suprematist decoration, which Malevic created starting from 1920, the watercolors Tribuna for oratorios and Schematic principle of a mural painting (1923) and the sketches for Suprematist clothes (XNUMX).
The Suprematist works, while constituting the central nucleus of the exhibition, do not exhaust the investigation into Malevic's artistic evolution, which reaches up to 1934, a year before his death.
In fact, the exhibition itinerary continues by investigating two other periods, in which it is possible to recognize the progressive Stalinization of Russia which subjected artists and intellectuals to censorship and which prompted them to embrace the dictates of socialist realism. Malevich, obliged to remain in Russia, responds to this constraint at first with a figurative art, combining geometric areas of color aimed at forming mannequin men and women, mindful of the theatrical costumes he designed in 1913, and in which the heads, ovals without face, a sign of the annihilation of the individual taking place in those years, partially recall the mannequins of de Chirico, an artist that Malevic held in consideration according to the recollections of his pupil Konstantin Rodzdestvenskij.
Malevic's is a research that does not completely surrender to the dictates of the regime; on the contrary, Suprematism is still evident in many cases. An example is represented by the work Casa rossa (1932), in which the wall that supports the roof is nothing if not a reference to the Red Square.
Finally, the exhibition welcomes an important nucleus of works created in the last years of his life, made up of about fifteen oils in which it is possible to see how, despite the siege of the dictatorship, his painting continues to show an innovative expressive power, particularly which appears evident from the relationship of the same subjects treated simultaneously by other artists, such as Gara (1932-1933) by Aleksandr Deineka, militarized Komsomol (1932-1933) by Alexander Samokhvalov or Fantasia (1925) by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.
A creative and inventive force that also appears evident in the last section, with the return to a certain "realism" of Renaissance inspiration whose themes, in particular that of the working and peasant class, but above all of the portrait and self-portrait, were at the center of Malevic's reflection since his early works.
On the occasion of the review, the GAMeC Educational Services promoted the project Everyone's crazy about Malevic, with the aim of building a network of collaborations between institutions, associations, bodies of the City of Bergamo and the province, bringing them together in a network of excellence.
