gregory orekhov revives malevich's painting into physical dimension

red vertical 2022 echoes the Russian avant-garde

Contemporary artist Gregory Orekhov pays homage to Kazimir Malevich with his latest land art ‘Red Vertical 2022’, where he translates painting from canvas to real life. The 7 x 5 x 2 m structure resembles a building, however, the ratio of width to height is close to the proportions used by Malevich in his famous painting ‘Red House’, which can be now found in the collection of the State Russian Museum. The public artwork presents a dominant vertical line, perpendicular to the horizon in the middle of the Russian Plain, in the spirit of the master.

The wood frame is covered with red polyethylene, as its natural folds form a picturesque relief. ‘Home’ is a reoccurring theme in Malevich’s work, dating back to 1906 with the pointillist painting ‘Landscape with Yellow House’. The color red is the leitmotif throughout Malevich’s artistic career starting in 1907, where one can notice the pomegranate shade of the bow in his ‘Self-portrait’. By the first half of the 1930s, red settles as the dominant color holding an important role in many paintings.

all images by Nikita Subbotin

the RECURRING combination of red and the ‘home’ theme

‘Malevich creates ‘Red House’ in 1932 combining color and a theme long familiar to him. However, that specific combination of color and subject produces an alarming effect of deprivation. For the building is not just a revolutionary-colored shack, but also a tower stripped of the usual hallmarks of life — windows and doors’, shares art critic Mikhail Sidlin. ‘Before the viewer is something which carries the shape of a building deprived of its function’.

‘Red House’ stands out from the red-roofed cottages he paints right about the same time (circa 1930), which feature brush-stroked windows, or his landscapes with blooming apple trees (circa 1930), in which the rural structures also retain a traditional look. ‘Red House’ is a building that refused to be a dwelling, devoid of human qualities. ‘The composition was formed from elements, a feeling of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness of life’, writes Malevich on the reverse side of a different canvas, ‘Complex Presentiment’ (1932), where a similar front-facing red house is pictured in the background.

The visual possibilities of red, combined with the motif of the house, create an unexpected result — the destruction of homeliness, which may reflect the artist’s state of mind in early 1930s Soviet Russia. Gregory Orekhov translates the painting from canvas to real life, preserving that feeling of space and the reality in which the master of ‘Black Square’ lives out the final years of his life.