In London, during the Russian-Ukrainian week, auction house Sotheby’s sold a painting of the famous Russian artist Ilya Chashnik “The Seventh dimension. Suprematist relief.” The work was done in the early 1920-ies. Its cost has reached £2.4 million, although it was originally estimated at £100 thousand to £150 thousand. So, as we see, the final price of the lower estimate exceeded 24 times.
This picture has such a value on the art market due to the fact that the short life of its author, and the almost complete destruction of the archives of UNOVIS in Vitebsk during the Second World war became the reason that works of the artist remained small.
Suprematist reliefs represent a transitional stage between scenes ( largely theoretical) and architectural models – architectural model. Floating elements in Seven dimensions – are the same two-dimensional bars or pure form, moved from his paintings, but now located with the “space between them.
It was the mention of Chashnik’s the seventh dimension, concepts that would be open in physics a few decades later, is best considered as an indication of the extent to which he went beyond the three terrestrial measurements in pure transcendental space
The first reliefs of the artist were presented on the second and third exhibition of paintings by UNOVIS held in 1921 and 1922 ,and the topic of his diploma work in Vitebsk was the problem of creating Suprematist forms.
Who knew that ” strips of cheap white paper, carefully glued to cardboard,” as the famous art critic Alexander Romm said, will have this value in the twenty-first century.
It should be noted that this work was exhibited in such world famous museums and galleries such as : gallery Leonard Hutton in new York, the Montreal Museum of fine arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculptor Garden in Washington, the Jewish Museum of new York, the Museum of fine arts of Berlin.
