Suprematism is kazimir malevich's 1915 russian abstraction reduced to pure geometric forms — square, circle, cross — on a void.
Suprematism was launched by Kazimir Malevich at the 'Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10' in Petrograd in December 1915, where he hung 'Black Square' — a black quadrilateral on a white field — in the corner traditionally reserved for the Russian Orthodox icon. The painting and the gesture together announced an art reduced to its absolute essentials: pure geometric form, freed from any reference to objects in the visible world, and laid against a sense of infinite space. Malevich expanded the vocabulary in 'White on White' (1918) and a series of works in red, black, and coloured circles, crosses, and rectangles. He surrounded himself with disciples including El Lissitzky and Olga Rozanova, and the movement became one of the central streams of Russian and Soviet avant-garde art alongside Constructivism. Suprematism's mystical, metaphysical orientation increasingly fell foul of Soviet demands for socially useful art; by the late 1920s Malevich had returned to figurative painting under official pressure, and he died in 1935. His geometric abstractions remain among the most radical and influential paintings of the 20th century.