Prayer

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born in 1878 in Kyiv. For a brief period, he attended the Kyiv School of Drawing and in 1896, he moved with his family to Kursk, where he lived until 1904. In 1904, he settled in Moscow and studied at Fedor Rerberg's workshop (1906-1910). He simultaneously participated in exhibitions by the "Union of Moscow Artists," which marked his initial documented contributions. In the 1910s he participated in a number of exhibitions, among them: "Valet de Carreau" (1910), exhibitions of the "Union of Youth" (1911-1914) and "Donkey's Tail" (1912), among others. In 1915, at the "Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings: 0.10" in Petrograd, he presented his Suprematist compositions for the first time, including the "Black Square." The following year, he published one of his most important theoretical essays titled "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism" and founded the "Supremus" group in Moscow. In 1918, he taught at the State Free Art Workshops (SVOMAS) and from 1919 to 1922, he taught at the Vitebsk School of Art and organized the "UNOVIS" group with the aim of promoting Suprematism in theory and practice. In 1922, he settled in Saint Petersburg, joined the annex of the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKΗUK) created by Tatlin and became the director of the Formalist-Technical Department. His painting, which shifted towards a more realist direction during the 1920s and 1930s, characterized as post-Suprematist, was exhibited in solo exhibitions in Warsaw (1927), Moscow (1929) and Kyiv (1930). He passed away in 1935 in Leningrad.