Malevich, How Come?
Curator: Dalia Danon
Orit Tuchman | Oran Hoffmann | Josyane Vanounou | Dafna Sartiel
Veronique Inbar | Zohdy Qadry | Hagit Kazinitz | Haya Sheps Avtalion | Larry Abramson
Michael Grobman | Nadav Rauchwerger | Nahum Tevet | Natali Issahary
Pnina Reichman | Rivka Gilad | Shuki Brokovsky | Tamar Lederberg | Thirtsa Ullmann
In 1915, Kazimir Malevich presented a black square on a white background, along with his other early Suprematist works, at an exhibition titled 0.10, in Petrograd. He hung that black square on a white background, which he called The Zero of Form, just below the ceiling in the corner of the exhibition space, in the spot where the family’s sacred icon would be hung in a traditional Russian Orthodox home. Its presentation in the corner designated for the holy icon marked a revolution: a complete renunciation of the visual representation of the world in favor of pure art that seeks to be form, light, and matter, which are, by themselves, the message, content, and essence of the work.
Malevich aspired to pure art, independent of phenomenal reality. He conceived the idea of Suprematism, which rejected narrative entirely. Art was not meant to tell a story. Its purpose was to evoke a sensory spiritual response in the viewer through the arrangement of pure forms and colors. Malevich spoke of abstract compositions based on fundamental forms that strive for a new consciousness and a utopian spiritual order amid chaos and revolution. In his work, matter, form, and light ceased to be means of description; they became a square, a line, a patch, or a space that is immediately experienced as pure presence. From this tension, which swings between formal reduction and spiritual depth, a new space opens up where the sensory and the spiritual coexist, and the pictorial surface becomes a field of consciousness.
The exhibition “Why Malevich?” is a group exhibition featuring 18 artists. It seeks to examine whether and why Malevich’s ideas continue to be relevant today, in an era in which form has sometimes become a sign, a logo, or a product, the world is flooded with images, distractions, and existential anxieties. This excess gives rise to a need to return to the fundamentals of visual experience: light, emptiness, matter, stain, action, movement, and reduction.
The participating artists do not imitate Malevich, but carry on the spirit of inquiry that had driven him. They present several approaches that examine his theory and philosophy: a search for form that is not an object but a consciousness event, a search for material that reveals itself as an impression, trace, memory, or a disappearance.
The exhibition presents a range of works that reflect minimalism, bodily action, working with light and exposure, drawing and photography that do not represent but reveal, political works, and the architecture of the human environment. All of these create a space where reduction opens the door to a new sensory spiritual experience. Just as Malevich sought to transcend representation and reach the sublime, so do the works in the exhibition touch on the elusive reality that appears in what is experienced even before it is deciphered.
Malevich’s pure and abstract geometric art is often perceived as detached from concrete content, devoid of imagery, body, or narrative. But in fact, it is based also on cultural connections, memories, emotions, materials, and everyday life. In the process of viewing, the viewer tends to decipher, identify, and understand, which presents the possibility of seeing in a more open, sensory, and creative way.
There is movement in the exhibition between gestures of color and line, which stem from emotional or intuitive impulses and multi-layered work methods based on observation, processing, and experimentation. Alongside these works are others, built through systematic material investigation, sometimes as a search for a rhythmic, modular, or random formal structure that redefines the relationships amongst form, material, and meaning.