This catalogue was published by Modernism Inc. on the occasion of our exhibition "Ilya and Kirill Zdanevich, From Futurism to 41°," October 31-December 21, 1991. The catalogue includes a scholarly essay by Françoise Le Gris.
Georgian avant-garde artists Kirill Zdanevich [1892-1969] and his brother Ilya Zdanevich [1894-1975] were at the heart of the development of 41°, the collective that the brothers formed with several artistic contemporaries with sympathetic temperaments and beliefs. 41° stood for strong alcohol, high fever, and the latitude of Tiflis; their ambition, as articulated in the one and only issue of their newspaper, was nothing less than “to put the world on a new axis.”
Resistant to aligning with any single art movement, Kirill combined multiple styles, like Cubism, Cubo-Futurism, Rayism and Suprematism. Meanwhile, Ilya was developing a new approach to theater, comprising an orchestra of voices each performing in a different poetic forms, scored with a dynamic new approach to typography.
