Kasimir Malevich

Painter Kasimir Malevich made pioneering geometric abstractions that embraced art as a pure object free of social and political context, concerned only with issues such as line, shape, and color. Malevich’s rigorous formal and conceptual approach to painting was instrumental in establishing Suprematism, a defining modernist movement that situated simple forms such as squares and triangles into monochromatic fields. Malevich eventually returned to representational painting in the 1920s under the Soviet guidelines of Socialist Realism, but his ideas and paintings proved massively influential to many subsequent modernist art movements. Malevich’s work has sold for more than $85 million on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, and the State Russian Museum, among many other institutions.