Red Vertical 2022: Gregory Orekhov’s minimalist tribute to Kazimir Malevich on the Russian Plain

A 7 x 5 x 2 metre red volume wrapped in polyethylene turns a field into a living canvas, echoing Malevich’s enduring motif of the house while reframing it as contemporary land art.

Red Vertical 2022 is a land art installation by artist Gregory Orekhov, conceived as a quiet homage to Kazimir Malevich and his radical rethinking of form. Placed on the Russian Plain, the work reads from a distance as a simple, upright presence: a spare timber frame, scaled to architectural proportions yet stripped of function, like a fragment of a building translated into pure sign. The installation’s dimensions, 7 x 5 x 2 metres, and its emphatic planar silhouette recall the measured clarity of Malevich’s compositions, including the proportions associated with his Red House motif. Here, the reference is not a literal reconstruction but a spatial quotation, one that lets landscape act as both backdrop and medium.

Malevich returned to the image of home across decades, from early paintings such as Landscape with Yellow House (1906) to later works where the domestic outline becomes an emblem rather than a place. Orekhov draws on that lineage, treating the house not as shelter but as an idea that can be relocated, abstracted, and re read within nature.

Red, too, carries its own chronology. From the deep, pomegranate tone of Malevich’s Self portrait (1907) to the increasingly dominant reds of his later period, the colour operates as a recurring signal in his practice. In Orekhov’s work, red becomes the installation’s single note, compressing that history into a single, frontal gesture.

The timber frame is wrapped in red polyethylene, a pragmatic material that behaves unexpectedly like pigment. Its natural folds, creases, and tensions create a shifting relief that changes with light and weather, turning the surface into something closer to a moving brushstroke than a fixed façade. The result is simultaneously graphic and tactile: a monochrome plane that never fully settles, because the landscape keeps rewriting it.

Red Vertical 2022 sits in the space between sculpture and architecture. It borrows construction logic, scale, and the suggestion of enclosure, yet refuses utility. That refusal is the point: the work invites viewers to consider how minimal form can carry cultural memory, how a “house” can be present without being habitable, and how site can complete a composition.

In that sense, the installation positions Malevich’s legacy inside a contemporary context where materials, weather, and photographic circulation shape meaning as much as geometry does.

Project Credit

Name: Red Vertical
Location: Russian Federation, Moscow
Artist: Gregory Orekhov / @gregory.orekhov
Completed: 2022
Photo: Nikita Subbotin