Malevich first showed his non-objective paintings publicly at 0.10, the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, held in Petrograd from December 1915 into January 1916. He exhibited thirty-nine geometric works there, including Black Square on a White Background and Red Square on a White Background, installing them in arrangements determined by the proportions within the paintings themselves^[1][2]. He hung the Black Square high across a corner of the room, deliberately echoing the position given to a religious icon in a traditional Russian household, a gesture that signalled the almost spiritual weight he attached to pure, objectless form^[3][2].

In the years following 0.10, Malevich continued producing abstract, geometric Suprematist works, many featuring colour and rectangles tilted away from the vertical. Around 1918 he pulled back from colour altogether and returned to a more purist approach with his White on White paintings, explaining that this third phase of Suprematism was on the way to white non-objective nature, white excitations, white consciousness and white purity as the highest stage of both repose and motion^[3]. After this series, Malevich judged that he had gone as far as non-objective painting could take him and turned his energy toward theoretical writing and teaching instead, though he continued to produce three-dimensional Suprematist models that would later feed into the Constructivist movement^[3].

Suprematism developed before the Russian Revolution but found an unusually receptive environment in its immediate aftermath. Malevich and other avant-garde artists were initially supported by the new Soviet government and given administrative and teaching posts, and Suprematism briefly became something close to the fashionable style of the young Soviet state, with Malevich holding teaching positions from 1919 onward and even serving as a curator at the Kremlin^[4]. That favourable position did not last. Through the 1920s, avant-garde institutions were gradually dismantled through administrative reform rather than open confrontation, and by 1932 Stalin's government had moved decisively to suppress independent abstract art, pushing Malevich's work out of public view until renewed interest in the 1950s began to restore his reputation^[4][5].