STATEMENT

The Last Futurist Exhibition Dobychina Gallery, Petrograd, 17 December 1915 - 17 January 1916

…….It’s been going dark for a long time. Sixteen months since the start of the First World War, the middle of winter and troop positions are frozen along the trenches of the Eastern Front.

In the shadows a man in a long coat stands facing the corner of a room. On the walls opposite are twenty-one paintings and a set of handwritten posters. An attendants’ chair sits on the floor near the corner.

He’s thinking angles, planes, shapes and colours.

The paintings are hung meticulously across the walls according to a grid of his own invention. They send a series of hard geometric shapes cascading down the walls of the gallery. The iconic ‘Black Square’ dominates the installation.

He’s thinking about technology, the brilliance of electric light, the roar of engines and the whirring of propellers.

He is serial abstractionist, hardcore radical and proto-revolutionary art theorist Kasimir Malevich. He’s a man who is convinced that any carved out pentagon or hexagon would have been a greater work of art than the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David.

The venue is the Dobychina Gallery at 7 Marsovo Pole, Petrograd. It’s the 16th of December 1915 and this is the Last Futurist Exhibition. It’s an event that has been dogged by controversy. In the run up to the show he got into a fist fight with a fellow exhibitor Vladimir Tatlin. As a rival and ideological opponent, Tatlin had objected to his work calling it amateur and unprofessional. In the end they exhibited in separate rooms. Tatlin had a sign installed over the door to his room, ‘Exhibition of Professional Artists’. Malevich exhibited in the other room.

The Last Futurist Exhibition closes on 17th January 1916. It’s twenty one months to the Russian Revolution. Food shortages cause queues on the streets of the city.

The Last Futurist Exhibition was presented at The Walker and Static in Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial October-November 2002.