In the search of 0, 10- The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting

100 years ago, in the winter of 1915/16, a legendary exhibition took place in Petrograd (today St. Petersburg), Russia, featuring 14 artists – seven men and seven women – of the Russian avant-garde. The show, which was titled The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0,10 (Zero-Ten), became one of the most influential in the history of modern art. It was here that Kazimir Malevich first presented his Black Square, the painting that became an icon of abstract art. It was here, too, that Vladimir Tatlin installed his revolutionary, likewise abstract Corner Counter-Relief for the first time, as a sculpture liberated from the plinth and made of recycled materials. Alongside them, well-known artists and others who are today largely forgotten showed fascinating paintings that chiefly engaged with Cubism and Futurism, the current trends in the pan-European art scene at that time.
To mark the centenary of 0,10, after many years of research the Fondation Beyeler is organizing an exhibition that for the first time reunites most of the works still surviving today from the original show, complemented by others dating from the same epoch. This critical reconstruction of the historical exhibition includes valuable loans from the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and 17 other Russian museums, as well as from celebrated western collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and MoMA in New York.
The guest curator is Matthew Drutt. The project has been generously sponsored by the AVC Charity Foundation and Cahiers d’Art. The parallel exhibition »Black Sun« presents a large selection of important works from the spheres of painting, sculpture, installation and film, which testify to the enormous influence of Malevich and his Black Square on contemporary art.