Artworks

Liubov Popova Russian: 1889 – 1924 A towering figure of abstract art from its infancy, Liubov Popova was a pioneer of Cubo-Futurism who, in 1912, worked at the Tower, a Moscow studio, with Vladimir Tatlin and other artists, and featured in such seminal exhibitions as Tramway V: First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings and 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, both in 1915 in St Petersburg, the latter being the exhibition at which Kazimir Malevich, famously, launched Suprematism with a selection of 39 works. Popova travelled widely: to Kiev, Pskov and Novgorod, where she saw ancient Russian churches and icons; to Paris, where she studied under Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac at La Palette; and to Italy, where she experienced early Renaissance art and gained familiarity with Futurism. She described painting as a ‘construction’ and used the building blocks of line and colour as part of her dynamic constructive process. Grounding the exhibition from a historical and an aesthetic vantage point, Untitled, c1918, and Non-Objective Composition, c1920, are a summation of Popova’s artistic trajectory. Both reveal how the artist conjured suggestions of movement and three-dimensionality from simple forms. The scale of these works, as with contemporaneous examples by Malevich, reveal the influence of icon painting. Shortly after these works were completed, Popova turned away from studio painting to execute utilitarian Productivist art such as textiles, porcelain and sets for theatre. She died of scarlet fever, aged 35, in 1924.