Order the catalogue			Unlike most of her colleagues in this exhibition, Rozanova lived and worked in St. Petersburg rather than Moscow. The artist never visited Western Europe, but she was certainly well aware of the discoveries of Cubism and especially Futurism and shared the Italians' fascination with the pictorial rendering of speed and machines. Paintings such as Fire in the City (Cityscape), 1914, demonstrate her proximity to Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni, while her more synthetic compositions such as Pub (Auction), 1914, imply a strong interest in Cubist collage and the concurrent zaum paintings of Kazimir Malevich with their 'nonsensical' collocations of fragmentary phenomena. As was the case for Malevich, the zaum compositions were a crucial exercise in the extrapolation, reduction, and removal of narrative elements and led directly to Rozanova's non-objective paintings of 1916-18.
			For Rozanova color was the essence and justification of abstract painting. In fact, she denoted her pictorial system as 'color painting,' emphasizing that conception had nothing in common with the world of physical objects and that painting should be self-referential, not imitative. Some would argue that, in their kinetic play and monochromatic fields, Rozanova's abstract paintings, such as Green Stripe (Color Painting), 1917, are even more radical, more engaging, and more experimental than Malevich's monochromes of the same period. Indeed, contemporaries implied that the 'father of Suprematism' was envious of his younger colleague's sharp intelligence and original vision.
			Above: Ivan Otsup, Easter with the Futurists. Group of Petrograd Futurists in the Studio of the Artist N. I. Kulbin, Petrograd, 1915. Rosanova is seated in the center.	Top right: Non-Objective Composition (Flight of an Airplane), 1916. Oil on canvas, 118 x 101 cm. Art Museum, Samara.