Ksenia Ender

Composition, 1918

Oil on cardboard
48,5 x 61,5 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections

In the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a loosely defined group of artists formed the Organic Art movement. Consisting of Yelena Guro, Boris, Maria and Ksenia Ender, they gathered around the musician, composer, artist and critic, Mikhail Matiushin. Ksenia Ender was trained at the studio in Spatial Realism at the Petrograd SVOMAS, where Matiushin experimented with the notion of “broadened vision” asserting that the real world must be observed at a full 360 degree angle and the possibility of a fourth dimension existing beyond space and time. Still, the main thrust of Matiushin’s thinking—and, therefore, the group’s art—was “the return of man to nature—to connect him to the inner, and at first glance elusive, processes of life, its rhythms and vibrations, to become a part of nature and to become identified with it.” During the 1920s a number of institutes for interdisciplinary scientific research in art, design and architecture were founded in the Soviet Union. One of them was the Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad—GINKhUK—where Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin also worked. There, Matiushin supervised the Department of Organic Culture with his Laboratory of Color, where Ksenia Ender also worked as a researcher between 1923 and 1926. “To formulate a universal language was one goal, to redesign the world for the masses outside the ‘dead’ museums another, and to produce a new kind of human being, a third.” (Graham Roberts)

Ksenia Ender, 1894 Sluzk - 1955 Leningrad