Squaring Up, Curators: Wilma Tabacco and Stephen Wickham
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Melodramas of a “Black Square” In 1913 at the Luna Park theatre in Saint Petersburg Kasimir Malevich displayed the first draft of what became one of the most important paintings of the twentieth century: Black Square. Its precursor, Black Quadrilateral, was the backdrop Malevich painted for the stage design of the Futurist Opera, Victory Over the Sun, a performance of radical high-energy sounds; eccentric costumes and with a libretto based on nonsense poems and hermetic vocabulary. It was an operatic event that was propelled by the experimental language of zaum, with music written by Michael Matyushin. It presaged a world unborn. The opera was a collectivist event that celebrated the exuberant chaos of pre-revolutionary Russia. The opera manifested the syncretism of millennial religious cults, speculations on the new physics of the fourth dimension and the repressed energy of artists, poets, musicians and thinkers. It was the tinder and tinsel of a culture lost in space. Russian political, cultural, artistic and social structures were on the edge of violent ferment. Polarisation of ideas, including art, had become extreme and ideas of order were challenged even at a cosmological level. The profound and profane whirled towards collisions that still make us shudder today. This exhibition celebrates the centenary of the genesis of Malevich’s “Black Quadrilateral”. The works in this exhibition are examples of the reverberations, inversions, extensions, extrapolations, reflections, interpretations, commentaries, homages and speculations that spring liberated from Malevich’s ideas while acknowledging and referencing the abyss that is The Black Square. Stephen Wickham © Copyright. 2013. |
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Louise Blyton
Long Loves Days, 2012, cobalt teal pigment on linen, 10 panels, 10x 90cm each |
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Lynne Eastaway
Tilt 1, 2012 acrylic on linen 180 x 200cm |
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Lynne Eastaway
Tilt 2, 2012 acrylic on linen 180 x 200cm 
Gill Gatfield
Multiple Choice 2013 Indian black granite, Italian Carrara marble 9 x 50cm Dia. (Ed. of 3)
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Gill Gatfield
Silver Fox, 2013 oil, steel, linen 20 x 20 x 6cm |
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Wilma Tabacco
M plus 1 – 4 acrylic on wood panel 40 x 40cm each |
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Fran Van Riemsdyk
Rolling square (2 hours 30 minutes), 2013 porcelaneous stoneware, wood, steel, Eddie Charlton billiard felt, paint 150 x 150 x 50cm |
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Stephen Wickham
Homage to Ralph Balson, #102, 2011 oil on linen 120 x 180cm |
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