«Blue Noses vs. Malevich» Project, 2006–2025

Contemporary art is a complex thing.Viewers often question its artistic value. Meanwhile, artists pour their heart and soul into proving that their creations mean something—that they are continuations of globally recognized cultural styles and movements. They create remakes of widely known classics, such as Rembrandt’s drawings or Tatlin’s tower, to achieve this.The champion in terms of such remakes is the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich and his «Black Square.» It is one of Russia’s foremost cultural brands, alongside the Byzantine icon and Anna Karenina.On the surface, the meaning of the «Black Square» seems obvious: it is the «zero of forms, ” a realization of the fundamental principles of visual language. It is as elemental a formula as E = mc² in physics. Even a student today knows that any pixelated image is composed of pixels. Nevertheless, the debates surrounding the „Black Square“ never cease, and poor artists continue to produce imitations of it.To put an end to this, artist Shaburov and his group mate, Mizin from the „Blue Noses, ” parodied the exploitation of Malevich’s Suprematist compositions. They simultaneously demonstrated how this could be done skillfully and without excessive pomposity.You can see more of this in the series: „Kitchen Suprematism, ” „Caucasian Suprematism, ” „Beach Suprematism, ” „Sanatorium Suprematism, ” „Suprematist Subbotnik, ” „Suprematist Tattoos, ” „Russian Monsters, ” and others.