Lot 328 N

Nikolai Suetin studied at the state workshops for fine art in Vitebsk, where he was involved in the UNOVIS (Champions of the New Art) group, founded by his teacher Kazimir Malevich, from 1920 onwards. At the revolutionary Vitebsk workshop Malevich, El Lissitzky, Suetin, Chashnik, and later Klucis worked together and without any recognisable distinction made between teacher and student on a goal no less ambitious than the “confirmation of Suprematism as the new constructivity of the forms of this world” (from a leaflet by the group, cited in: Wassili Rakitin. Die Welt als Suprematismus, in: exhib. cat. Malewitsch; Suetin; Tschaschnik, Galerie Gmurzynska Cologne 1992, p. 28). These were the years when the first signs of the transfer of Suprematism's radical artistic ideas into architecture were developing.
In Vitebsk, from 1921, Suetin initially occupied himself primarily with the movement of Suprematist form in space. Works were created which call to mind a view from above on to Constructivist geometrical architectures and were received with great interest by El Lissitzky in particular. After the end of his artistic education, Suetin increasingly dedicated his attention to transferring the Suprematist aesthetic into the real world of post-revolutionary Russia. The present gouache from 1931 shows the great extent to which he was occupied with developing the universal formal language of the non-objective into a new way of shaping the world. It amalgamates Suprematist and constructive questions regarding space and surface with utopian architectural designs for cosmic habitats.