Alexandra Alexandrovna Exter, Colour Dynamic, 1918

Signed on the front
This work on paper is based upon a large (same-titled) gouache on wood painting that was featured in the monograph published on the occasion of the Exter retrospective at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Moscow. 2010 by Dr. Georgy Kovalenko. The large Colour Dynamic painting is illustrated on page 179, and the catalogue states that it was held in a private collection, Switzerland.
In 1918, the year the work was made, Alexandra Ekster was living in Kiev, which at that time was part of the Ukrainian People's Republic, before eventual Soviet control. That year, she was deeply involved in the Kiev artistic scene - her home and studio became a gathering place for avant-garde artists, poets and intellectuals, including members of the Russian and Ukrainian Futurist movements. (She later left for Odessa in 1919 and then emigrated to Western Europe in the early 1920s.) Since her family was relatively well-off, she traveled more than many of her colleagues in the Russian avant-garde.
Alexandra Alexandrovna Exter Biography
Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer.
As a young woman, her studio in Kiev attracted all the city's creative luminaries, and she became a figure of the Paris salons, mixing with Picasso, Braque and others. She is identified with the Russian/Ukrainian avant-garde, as a Cubo-futurist, Constructivist, and influencer of the Art Deco movement. She was the teacher of several School of Paris artists such as Abraham Mintchine, Isaac Frenkel Frenel and the film directors Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich among others. Exter spent the majority of her creative life between Kiev and Paris, and while she is remembered as an important member of the Russian Avant-Garde group, she also mixed with the Cubists and Art Deco painters of France.

This work bears the official collection stamp of Leningrad collector Solomon Shuster on the verso (shown)
"The fate of all outstanding Soviet art collectors is comprised of squalid entrances, broken banisters, and cartridge clips of doorbells,” the pre-eminent Leningrad art-lover, collector, and film director Solomon Shuster wrote about his fellow connoisseurs. “But on the inside [of their apartments], as in Hauff’s fairytales, was the glow of beauty.” Shuster was just one of many Soviet citizens who tried to escape mundane socialist routine by travelling to the wonderland embodied in Russia’s unconventional, modernist paintings from the early 20th century. He and his fellow collectors sought true art, untouched by the lethargic, stiff socialist realism, to fill their collections. But buying such pieces was fraught with risk. The Soviet authorities considered avant-gardists, nonconformists, and all other modernists to be inimical to the newly-established communist ideology, which preached cultural unification and disapproved of private ownership. Collectors who sought and obtained art by persecuted masters risked not only their wealth and property, but also their freedom. Yet throughout the Soviet Union, a select band jeopardised their positions to snap up modernist paintings, preserving what would later become a generation’s artistic legacy..." = courtesy of New East Digital Archive

Elegantly floated and framed in a handmade white wood frame under UV plexiglass . The frame bears a die-cut window on the verso to reveal the Leningrad collection stamp.
Measurements:
Framed:
20 inches by 15.5 inches by 1.5
Artwork:
15 inches by 10.5 inches