Ivan Chuikov

Chuikov’s Blue Square (Dedicated to Malevich) highlights the importance of Russian avant-garde theory for the representatives of the non-conformist movement, which many of them started discovering during Khrushchev’s Thaw. In the words of the art critic Boris Groys, Chuikov was preoccupied with ‘…methods of fragmentation, appropriation and recombination to reveal the pure pictorial quality of his work, to discover the integral and potentially infinite painted surface where certain configurations of form and colour replace each other, but which remains equal to itself forever’ (B.Groys, ‘Twenty Years Later’, in Ivan Chuikov, Moscow: Regina Gallery, 2010, p.114).

By dedicating the painting to the pioneer of modernist abstraction, Chuikov continues Malevich’s quest for ‘the realism of painterly form as an end in itself’ (J.Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934, New York: Viking Press, 1976, p.124), in this case employing elements such as a black and white photograph and a Soviet price tag.