Lot 5
  • 5

Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin

Estimate
25,000 - 35,000 GBP
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Description

  • Nikolai Mikhailovich Suetin
  • Design for an Architecton
  • signed in Cyrillic and dated iyun' 1927 l.r.
  • pencil on paper
  • sheet size: 22 by 17.5cm, 8 3/4 by 7in.

Provenance

Estate of the artist
Private collection
Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne
Acquired from the above in 1994

Exhibited

Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Malevich. Suetin. Chashnik, 13 June - 31 July 1992, no.147

Literature

V.Rakitin, Suprematisti russi degli anni 20: Suetin, C̆as̆nik, Leporskaja, Milan: Fabbri, 1991, p.82 illustrated b/w
Exhibition catalogue Malevich. Suetin. Chashnik, Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1992, p.201, no.147 illustrated; p.305 listed

Catalogue Note

First produced by UNOVIS at Vitebsk in the early 1920s, architectons represent the application of Suprematist principals to plastic form. The move into three-dimensions was a logical progression from painterly Suprematism and these constructions employed the same visual language of circles, squares and crosses – the cruciform composition allowing for the dynamic interaction of the individual components.

Architecture was seen as the end-goal and the ultimate synthesis of the arts but the intention of Suetin, Chashnik and Malevich was not to design buildable models. Architectons are essentially intellectual experiments whose aim was to contribute to the study and theory of architecture and town planning.

As the art theorist Aleksei Gan explained in his article in Sovremennaya arkhitektura, 1927, no.3 ‘while volumetric Suprematism does not yield objects of that concrete social utility without which modern architecture is not architecture at all, they have vast importance as abstract research of new form’.