About the artist

Ivan Alekseevich Kudriashev (Kaluga, 1896; Moscow, 1972) attended the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1913-1917) and later studied at the Free State Art Studios (SVOMAS) in Moscow, under Kazimir Malevich. In 1917 he painted his first abstract compositions.

In 1919 he was sent to Orenburg to establish a branch of SVOMAS. There he met Malevich and Lissitzky (1920). He participated in the First State Exhibition in Orenburg, showing sketches for the mural paintings of the First Soviet Theatre, and produced a number of abstract works.

In 1920 he worked on the interior of the Summer Theatre of the Red Army and organized a branch for the “Unovis” group in Orenburg.

In 1921, being the supervisor of a train for the evacuation of starving children, he arrived in Smolensk, where he met Katarzina Kobro and Wladislav Strzeminskii, Polish artists, followers of Malevich.

In late 1921 he returned to Moscow. He participated in the First Russian Art Exhibition in the “Galerie van Diemen” in Berlin (1922).

From 1925 to 1928 he showed his cosmic abstract works at the first, second and fourth exhibitions of the “Society of Studio Artists”. By the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s, he focused on the problems of cosmic abstract painting, as perceived through Suprematism, under the influence of the ideas of the engineer and astrophysicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.