Sergei Ivanovich Kalmykov was a Russian and Soviet avant-garde artist, teacher, art theorist, philosopher, and theater designer.

Sergei Kalmykov was born on October 6 (October 18, new style), 1891, in Samarkand. His parents were Ioann Yemelyanovich Kalmykov, a “Chuguev tradesman” originally from the Kharkov province, and Anna Yemelyanovna, an “Orenburg tradeswoman.” In 1893, the Kalmykov family with their four children moved to Orenburg, where his father became the head of the Transport Office of the Russian Society for the Forwarding, Insurance, and Storage of Luggage. He died when Sergei was seven years old.

In August 1910, he arrived in St. Petersburg and enrolled in E.N. Zvantseva’s private art school, where he studied under K.S. Petrov-Vodkin and M.V. Dobuzhinsky.

In May 1914, he returned to Orenburg; the time spent in St. Petersburg’s artistic milieu and his teachers had a powerful influence on the young Kalmykov. At that time, Kalmykov’s work was distinguished by “vivid colors and well-defined forms.” In this, he inherited the high academic traditions of the greatest masters of Russian painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Serov, Vrubel, Surikov, and Kuznetsov.

From January 1916 to March 1917, Sergei Kalmykov served as a private in a reserve infantry regiment, but due to illness (tuberculosis of the bones of his right hand), he was discharged from the army. He strongly “welcomed the Great October Socialist Revolution” (from his autobiography).

From 1920 to 1922, Kalmykov taught at the Orenburg State Free Art Workshops (GSKHM), actively participated in the local branch of UNOVIS (Affirmers of New Art), and served on the organization’s tvorkom (creative committee). He attempted to paint according to Malevich’s system, while simultaneously developing his own idea and plan for reforming contemporary art.

The artist exhibited his major works, Suprematism and “mathematical painting,” alongside sketches by Ivan Kudryashov and Nadezhda Timofeeva at the First State Art Exhibition (Orenburg, 1921). It was his independent and innovative stance that led to a split in the tvorkom, which “failed to agree on common work goals.”

The artist devoted his early experiments to the theoretical work “Study of the Four-Dimensional World from the Painter’s Point of View” (1919-1921) and the lecture “Naturalism and Abstraction in Fine Art and the Science of the Forms of the Visible World” (February 21, 1921). Both were contrasted with the works of the Suprematists, such as Malevich’s Orenburg lecture “State, Society, Criticism, and the New Innovative Artist” (July 25, 1920). During this period, Kalmykov actively corresponded with Wassily Kandinsky, sharing his ideas on the “new” painting, discussing and debating them. Art as an expression of the “Four-Dimensional World.” What was the intention? Figuratively, Kalmykov related his work to the works of the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who gave a geometric expression to the “Four-Dimensional World”—the unification of the three characteristics of space and time (space-time).

Kalmykov’s interest in the exact sciences was not abstract, but rather applied and academic: with their help, he sought a universal “formula for beauty” that could be expressed in a language uniting science and art. The artist was inspired by the phenomena of minimalism revealed to him (“connections of the simplest signs”), by how “an infinite number of infinite series can intersect at a single point, and this infinity can be defined by only one visible sign, a point, precisely taken on a sheet of paper in relation to other interpenetrating points on the paper.”

His 1920 canvas from the “Mathematical Painting” series, “Isolated Visible Infinite Lines and Their Combination,” is not simply a painting but rather a visual embodiment of complex abstract ideas, where mathematical laws and artistic vision merge. Kalmykov, a man of encyclopedic knowledge, was unafraid to experiment at the intersection of arts and sciences. He saw mathematics not as dry formulas, but as a source of inspiration capable of generating new aesthetic forms.

On April 27, 1967, at 7:00 PM, painter, graphic artist, and theater designer Sergei Ivanovich Kalmykov, one of the most important representatives of the Russian artistic avant-garde, died alone and in poverty in the Republican Psychiatric Hospital of the Kazakh SSR in Alma-Ata, “due to signs of severe exhaustion and cardiovascular failure.” Kalmykov’s death did not stir society at the time and was not perceived as a significant loss to art. Attention to his multifaceted work and recognition of his dignity as an original and talented creator will come many years after his death.