Imaginary Cosmos at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Samara

Imaginary Cosmos turns the night sky into a gallery theme. The State Tretyakov Gallery’s Samara branch gathers painting that looks upward, and organizes it in four sections that run from the starry sky to unidentified objects. The route moves from what the eye sees overhead to what the imagination adds to it.

The centerpiece is what is identified as the 1929 version of Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. The artist first showed his Black Square in 1915 at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd, where it marked a decisive break with representational painting. Malevich pioneered Suprematism, a system of pure geometric abstraction on monochromatic grounds, and here a flat black form on white can be read as a window onto empty space, with no horizon or figure to anchor it.

Around it hang works by artists who approached the heavens from very different directions. Viktor Vasnetsov specialized in mythological and historical subjects, and is considered a co-founder of Russian folklorist and romantic nationalistic painting. His presence links the show’s cosmic theme to the older world of legend. Arkhip Kuindzhi, a landscape painter reportedly of Urum origin, brings the tradition of looking at nature and sky with a painter’s eye. Natalia Goncharova was a founding member of the Jack of Diamonds and the Donkey’s Tail, and with Mikhail Larionov invented Rayonism, a style built from intersecting beams of light.

The selection also includes paintings by Infante, Kandinsky, Chashnik, Yuon and Lissitzky. Together the names span landscape, folklore and abstraction, so a visitor can follow one question through several generations of Russian painters: what does the sky hold, and how do you paint something no one has seen? The exhibition opens on 30 October 2026.