Mikhail Karasik. Homage to Khidekel

St Petersburg: M.K. Publishers, 2012
35 × 59 cm. Edition: 12 copies
12+1 compositions – lithograph in one colour printed by the artist on BFK Rives Cream paper. Unbound. In a folder — plywood, cardboard covered with book cloth, silkscreen printed. In Russian and in English; translated by Paul Williams.

A Homage to Khidekel is a set of lithographic studies. The creation of this folder was prompted by the works of one of the consistent pupils of Malevich, the artist and architect Lazar Khidekel (1904–1986). In the prints I have tried to ‘interpret’ Khidekel’s architectural designs and drawings. We should recall that at the turn of the 1920s lithography was actively used to promote the plastic ideas of UNOVIS, with Malevich’s celebrated album 34 Drawings being one example. Besides the quotations from Suprematist and architectural plastic art, my album also contains a series of prints on the theme of old tools, both wooden — a plane, bevel gauge and a mortice gauge — and metal — a protractor, shears and an adjustable spanner. They all belonged to my father and now, strange as it might seem, have acquired a place not in the tool chest but among the publications about art on the bookshelf. Their simple geometry, shape and material, the surface polished by working hands have definitively established these tools as objects of material culture.