In Search of 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting

This exhibition celebrates that groundbreaking moment in the history of modern art when Kazimir Malevich debuted his new nonobjective paintings―including the “Black Square”―under the banner of Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin introduced his revolutionary counter-relief sculptures. Malevich and Tatlin were bitter rivals and diametrically opposed in their creative thinking, so when the exhibition 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting, organized by fellow artist Ivan Puni, was launched in Petrograd in 1915, the other 12 artists in the show (Ivan Puni, Liubov Popova, Ivan Kliun, Ksenia Boguslavskaya, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Nathan Altman, Vasily Kamensky, Vera Pestel, Maria Ivanovna Vasilieva, Anna Michailovna Kirillova and Mikhail Menkov) chose sides. It was a stylistically diverse exhibition, with Cubist-inspired works and the first nonobjective paintings and reliefs. In Search of 0,10 accompanies a show at the Fondation Beyeler, which includes a large number of the works from the original exhibition. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curator Matthew Drutt and other leading scholars, as well as documents gathered together and translated for the first time.