Legends

A student of Malevich and Pevzner in the Moscow free workshops, Kudriashov was a leading representative of the pictorial movement of “cosmism”.

His father manufactured aeronautical devices in the bureau of the engineer and astrophysicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Kudriashov helped his father with drawings and models and eventually became interested in the ideas of intergalactic light-air prophecy (cosmism). It can be said that he was the predecessor of the contemporary artists James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson.

One of his key works is the General Scheme of the Decor of the Auditorium of the 1st Soviet Theater in Orenburg. This is an example of how abstract painting can be combined with real space. Standing in front of the painting, the viewer should imagine lying on the floor of an old multilevel theater, and then the imaginary arches will turn out to be the painted tiers, the floor - a suprematist curtain, and the red square in the center - a ceiling panel.

At the end of the 1920s, Kudriashov’s ideas were no longer in demand. Gradually since 1932 the artist was expelled from all artistic associations for “formalism and persistent pointlessness”, but he could not change his principles and preferred to be poor, but not a follower of socialist realism. During this period, he took on any work, for 2 years he was even a prison guard being in charge of a storage room of a prison.

Kudriashov anticipated Gagarin's flight. Since 1957, he had again turned to the space theme. Inspired by news of the cosmonaut dogs Belka and Strelka, Kudriashov created a watercolor of a Suprematist cosmonaut stretching his arms in interstellar space.