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“In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.” Or so said Kazimir Malevich 14 years later, as he sought to explain the many issues and implications that surrounded Suprematism. When, early in the 20th century, Malevich turned to geometry, he did so in part to try to strip questions of representation, of pictorialism, from the picture plane so his works might resonate even more impactfully with viewers — through a rational language, geometry.

Two centuries later, the uncomfortable relationships between the …