Black Square

Description

In December 1915, in a rented hall in Petrograd, Kazimir Malevich hung a small canvas high across the corner of the room, the spot where a Russian household would place its icon. That canvas was a black square reproduction of nothing at all, and it changed the course of painting. If you are considering this black square reproduction for your own wall, you are bringing home the moment painting agreed to stop describing the world and start proposing new ground for itself.

About Black Square Reproduction

The painting itself is almost absurdly simple to describe: a black field bordered by white, set on a square linen canvas measuring 79.5 by 79.5 centimetres. Malevich built that black field slowly, in layers, so that up close you find brushwork, small shifts in tone, and the fine net of cracks that has spread across the surface over the past century. The square is not quite square, the black is not quite flat, and the white border carries its own worked texture. Nothing in the frame refers to a tree, a face, or a room.

He called it the zero point of painting, and he meant it literally. After years working through Cubo-Futurist experiments, Malevich arrived here at a single geometric form stripped of any task beyond standing for feeling itself. The exhibition where it debuted was titled 0,10, a number chosen to suggest the end of figurative painting and the start of something counted from zero. Suprematism followed directly from this canvas, and Malevich returned to the square format more than once in the years after, but none of the later versions carry the same raw, worked surface as this first attempt to paint nothing and mean everything by it.

The hand-painted reproduction

Our painters build this reproduction the way Malevich built the original, layer by layer, in oil on canvas rather than a single flat pass of pigment. They match the square format precisely, work the black field until it holds the tonal variation and the edge softness of the Tretyakov canvas, and let the white ground carry its own visible brushwork rather than sitting as a clean, printed border. This is a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, not a printed copy, and every square inch of black has gone through a human hand with a loaded brush. Framed this way, as a fine art reproduction built surface by surface, it holds the wall the way the original holds a corner of a gallery room.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas, not printed
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation on arrival
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country