Black Square
Чорний квадрат
A large square canvas answering Malevych directly, painted at the height of Dubovyk's nonconformist period and acquired by Norton Dodge for his collection of unofficial Soviet art. Dubovyk's debt to Malevych's construction of space runs through the whole series.
Image: reproduction sourced from dodge.zimmerli.rutgers.edu. This work is still in copyright — © the artist / rights holder. Shown for editorial and educational purposes; contact us for attribution or removal.
Related Works
Nuclear Physicists
A group composition of scientists in the flattened, graphic manner of the Thaw-era austere style, from the period when Dubovyk was still working within an approved Soviet subject range. It marks the last phase before his turn to abstraction.
Bouquet
The pivotal canvas of Dubovyk's career, in which the flower is reduced to a circle and a square and stops being a depiction to become a sign. Every later cycle in his work descends from this reduction.
Television in the Night
A tempera sheet from the mid-1970s in which a glowing rectangle in the dark becomes another of Dubovyk's ambiguous signs, part image and part window. It comes from the group of works Norton Dodge smuggled out of the USSR.
Tablets
A square canvas from Dubovyk's underground years, in which his invented signs are laid out like inscriptions on stone tablets. The title makes explicit the quasi-scriptural status he gave his own pictorial alphabet.