Suprematism, Unovis and Lazar Khidekel - Harriman Institute, October 8

 
 

Suprematism,  Unovis and Lazar Khidekel 
 
Harriman Institute at Columbia University 
420  West 118th Street, 12th Floor 
New  York, NY 10027 
Exhibition on view: September 10 - October 15,  2014 
RECEPTION  & PANEL DISCUSSION: October 8, 6:00 PM 
 
Join us for a reception and panel  discussion to commemorate the 100 years 
of Suprematism, 95 - of UNOVIS  (Affirmers of the New Art) and the 110th 
Anniversary of Lazar Khidekel  (1904-1986), the Suprematist artist, visionary 
architect, pioneer of  environmentalism and founding member of the UNOVIS  
group. 
The exhibition  includes twenty four images in print form - paintings, 
drawings, period photographs, UNOVIS documents, and  publications, including the 
legendary AERO, Khidekel’s handmade book from 1920,  considered as one of 
the first ecological manifestos of the modern  era. This rich set of material 
comes from the Khidekel Archive, one  of the most comprehensive archives of 
the Russian  avant-garde. 
Moderated  by Dr. Regina Khidekel, the discussion will explore different  
aspects of Suprematism including the UNOVIS educational system, the 
Suprematist  painting and its development in the works of the younger  “UNOVIS” 
generation. Also to be  examined Lazar  Khidekel's Suprematist painting, his 
role in the transition of Suprematism  from a 2-dimensional art form to a 
movement which found its  expression in real life - visible today in 
architecture, the processes of urbanization, and futuristic yet environmentally  
conscious city planning of the time.  
Speakers: Dr.  Regina Khidekel, art critic,  curator and president of the 
Lazar Khidekel Society, director of Russian -  American Cultural Center in 
New York - York (RACC), the author of numerous  publications on the history of 
Russian avant-garde. 
Slide  presentation about life and work of Lazar Khidekel. 
Dr.  Masha Chlenova 
The Endpoint of Painting:  UNOVIS and the Transformation of the  Lived 
Experience
A few months  after his arrival at the Free Art Studios in Vitebsk in late 
1919, Kazimir  Malevich announced that the medium of painting had reached 
its limit and it was  time to create art that would directly transform the 
fabric of everyday  experience. “Having established definite plans for the 
Suprematist system,” the  artist wrote inDecember 1920, “I am entrusting the 
further development of what  is now architectural Suprematism to young 
architects in the broadest sense of  the word.” 
This talk will  explore the inner logic of development of Malevich’s 
abstract system and the  expanded form it took in the artistic practices of the 
collective UNOVIS, whose  members decorated streets, designed printed 
materials, created reliefs and  architectural models. Driven by a paramount urge to 
transcend boundaries between  artistic mediums, UNOVIS created a radical 
language that briefly became  synonymous with the highest ideals of the 
revolution. The formative stages of  Lazar Khidekel’s artistic practice will be 
examined in this context.   
Masha Chlenova is an art historian and curator specializing in  20th 
century art with a focus on Russian avant-garde. She received a  PhD in Art 
History from Columbia University with a dissertation entitled “On  Display: 
Transformations of the Avant-garde in Soviet Public Culture,  1928-1933.” Most 
recently she was a curatorial assistant at the Department of  Painting and 
Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked with Leah  Dickerman on 
a major survey of abstraction across the mediums entitled Inventing 
Abstraction, 1910-1925 and an  upcoming retrospective of Francis Picabia. Her 
writing has appeared in the  journal October and in exhibition  catalogs published 
by MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and Tate Modern. 
Anna  Bokov, Ph.D. Candidate,  Yale University, will talk about the 
pioneering  educational systems at UNOVIS and  Vkhutemas. Although short-lived, 
these avant-garde schools were critical  platforms for experimenting with new 
design methods and for developing new  modernist design language. 
Dr. Xenia  Vytuleva “Decoding  Modernities” 
Operating with formulas, algorithms and codes, Soviet Avant Garde  
architecture still remains a black box in the context of modern histories. Dr.  
Vytuleva’s talk is addressing Avant Garde legacy, its interrelation with the  
neo-scientific discourse, migration of metaphors and tropes from various  
ideological and disciplinary platforms, contextualizing the legacy of Lazar  
Khidekel’s spatial experiments within a  broader fabric of contemporary 
cultures. 
Xenia  Vytuleva is an  architecture historian and theorist and curator. She 
holds a Ph.D. in Art  History and is currently a visiting assistant 
professor at Columbia University  in NY. A recipient of various grants and awards, 
and most recently the Graham  Foundation for the Project "Soviet Secret 
Cities during the Cold War", Dr.  Vytuleva is writing extensively on theory of 
preservation and theory of  Architectural Representation. A head researcher 
at the Institute of the Theory  and History of Architecture (NIITIAG) at the 
Russian Academy of Science, Moscow,  Vytuleva is currently working on a book 
entitled “Aesthetics of Uncertainty in  Experimental Practices of the 20th 
Century”. She is a member of DoCoMoMO,  Russia, and the program “Preserving 
the Architectural Heritage” in Moscow,  co-organizer and consultant of 
Columbia University platform at Venice Biennale  2014.  
About  Lazar Khidekel
Lazar Khidekel worked closely with Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kazimir  
Malevich in Vitebsk from 1918 to 1922, where he became an important 
proponent  and theoretician of Suprematism and a founding member of the UNOVIS group 
 (Affirmers of New Art), which included other notable artists such as El  
Lissitzky, Nina Kogan, Vera Ermolaeva, Ilya Chashnik, and Nikolai  Suetin. 
While  still a student of Petrograd/Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers 
(1922-1929),  Lazar Khidekel became an influential force in fueling 
Suprematist ideas among  faculty members and students, by lecturing, building 
bridges between LISI and  INKhuK, and creating the first Suprematist architectural 
project - the Workers'  Club (1926). Widely published in Russia and abroad, 
this project expressed the  new direction of Leningrad avant-garde 
architecture, the Suprematist  Constructivism. 
In the  1920s, Lazar Khidekel, the only architect in Malevich's group, 
developed  innovative ideas for futurist cities which included communal houses 
and  Suprematist skyscrapers, suggesting a new way of life. Among his 
realized  projects were socialist towns conjoining industrial and residential 
complexes  (1930-1932), the first radio-theater, House of Radio, the first 
three-hall Movie  Theater, as well as schools and educational institutions. 
Khidekel’s projects of  the 1930s were granted landmark status in the  1960s. 
Today,  with the rise of the Internet as a platform for independent 
thinkers, we can  learn a great deal about the relevance of Khidekel’s visionary 
projects, as seen  in two recent online discussions of this aspect of his  
work: 
Khidekel’s vision still manage to look futuristic, arguably more so than  
most of the Metabolists or Situationist projects that today feel 
retro-futurist,  inextricably tied to the past. Khidekel’s work remains endlessly 
floating  towards the future. 
As Edwin  Heathcote from Financial Times states:  “Khidekel is barely known 
 compared with his now-stellar contemporaries, yet in his fusing of art,  
architecture and urbanism, he remains arguably the most visionary of them  
all.” 
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/0c4b0fde-0d04-11e4-bcb2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz38Sx7gLsE 
A  documentary film Lazar  Khidekel, Kanal Kultura, 2011, and animation 
Khidekel Element – Suprematism for  Humanity from the ongoing The 14th 
International Architecture Biennale  in Venice, will also be shown. 
Shown in Russia, USA and  Europe: 
·         First State Exhibition of Local and Moscow Artists,  Vitebsk, 
1919 
·         UNOVIS exhibitions, Vitebsk, Moscow  1919-1922 
·         The First Russian Art Exhibition, Galerie van  Diemen, Berlin, 
1922 
·         Exhibition of Paintings by Petrograd Artists of All  Trends, 
Academy of Fine Arts, Petrograd, 1923 
·          First exhibition of the research departments of the  Institute 
of Artistic Culture, May 25 to June 8, Leningrad,  1924. 
·          First Exhibition of Modern Architecture, Moscow,  VKhUTEMAS, 
1927 
·         Leningrad Architecture for 18 years. Russian Museum.  Leningrad, 
1935 
·         The Great Utopia Guggenheim Museum, NY  1992 
·         The Great Utopia State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow,  1993 
·         Europa, Europa SchirnKunsthalleFrankfurt,  1994 
·         Lazar Markovich Khidekel. Suprematism and Architecture,  Leonard 
Hutton Galleries, NY, 1995 
·         Kazimir Malevich.Werk und Wirkung, Museum Ludwig Koln,  1995 
·          Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change, The  Jewish 
Museum, NY , 1996 
·         In Malevich’s Circle, State Russian Museum, St.  Petersburg, 2000 
·         The Rediscovered Suprematist, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich,  2010-11 
·         Proun Gallery, Moscow 2010, 2011,  2012 
·         The Rediscovered Suprematist -2,The Lowenhoff, Zurich ,  2012 
·         The Floating Worlds and Future Cities, The YIVO  Institute, NY 
2013 
·         Aviation and Avant-Garde, The Moscow Jewish  Museum/Tolerance 
Center, 2014 
·         Khidekel Element-Suprematism for  Humanity at Absorbing 
Modernity:  1914-2014, Venice Architecture Biennial 2014 
·         Building  Drawings, Drawing Buildings, exhibition  and panel 
discussion at Pushkin House, London. July 9 – September 25,  2014 
·         The International Lazar Khidekel Award ceremony will take  place 
in Baku in October 2014.  
·         Lazar Khidekel  and Suprematism, book by Prestel  Publishing will 
be released onOctober 15, 2014. 
·         Exhibition at Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, November  2014 
The  Russian American Cultural Center (RACC) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3)  
organization, est. in 1998. Museum quality exhibitions on Russian 
avant-garde,  contemporary art and photography, collections, archive preservation, 
research  and scholarly publications, a wide range of cultural and literary 
events, and  film festivals enhancing the NY art scene.
Support our work: donate and  become a RACC member. 
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