Untitled
Aleksander Rodchenko
ALEKSANDER RODCHENKO, 1920. OIL ON WOOD.
One year after this artwork was made, Rodchenko declared the end of painting. In a seminal exhibition in his native Russia, he presented three works, each a canvas displaying a single colour - the first monochromatic paintings in art history. “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion”, he said, “I affirmed: it’s all over”. But this did not come from nowhere, in fact Rodchenko had been engaging in quiet revolution and dissent for most of his artistic life, creating work that built off of Kazemir Malevich’s Suprematism to find the simplest reduction of form possible. For all of his work as a painter, it is graphic design that perhaps owes its greatest debt to Rodchenko’s geometric renderings. He worked methodically, trying to illuminate human visibility in his works, making his brushstrokes so clinical as to look machine operated. He had an innate understanding of composition and colour, and so much of the simplicity of contemporary design was born from a young man in 1920’s Russia’s attempts at finding order in a world of chaos.