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Lot Essay
While a cadet at Military School, Suetin became interested in drawing and in the art of Ciurlionis and Vrubel. He attended the Vitebsk Popular Art Institute, and together with Ilia Chashnik and El Lissitzky, avidly followed Malevich, whose aesthetic theories he propagated through exhibitions, publications and personal writings. He remained in Vitebsk until 1922, and founded the Unovis group of artists.
Committed to the purity of the abstract forms, Suetin's works betray the influence of Malevich's Suprematism. Both artists were fascinated by the play of forms, their fission, collision, and interpenetration. Though commenting upon painting, Suetin clearly explained in a discourse on Suprematism his logic of the pictorial surface of a work: "For all systems in painting there exists one law whereby the plane can be filled. This law is dictated by the sensation that the plane cannot have a dead place, i.e. each point of the plane is in a state of active effect on us and thereby on the whole of our physical being" (quoted in J. Bowlt and N. Misler Twentieth-Century Russian and East European Painting, London 1993, p. 281).
Committed to the purity of the abstract forms, Suetin's works betray the influence of Malevich's Suprematism. Both artists were fascinated by the play of forms, their fission, collision, and interpenetration. Though commenting upon painting, Suetin clearly explained in a discourse on Suprematism his logic of the pictorial surface of a work: "For all systems in painting there exists one law whereby the plane can be filled. This law is dictated by the sensation that the plane cannot have a dead place, i.e. each point of the plane is in a state of active effect on us and thereby on the whole of our physical being" (quoted in J. Bowlt and N. Misler Twentieth-Century Russian and East European Painting, London 1993, p. 281).