El Lissitzky was a designer, typographer, architect, and photographer affiliated with the Soviet Constructivist and Suprematist movements. He studied and worked as an architect and engineer in Germany and Russia before receiving an invitation from Marc Chagall in 1919 to teach at the Vitebsk School of Art in Belarus. There he encountered painter Kasimir Malevich, the recent founder of the Suprematist movement, which strove to create a style of purely non-objective painting comprised of a language of geometric forms. In 1920 Lissitzky coined the term "Proun"—an acronym for the Russian words meaning "project for the affirmation of the new"—to refer to a series of abstract works that combined the Suprematist lexicon of geometric, monochromatic forms with tools of architectural rendering. In Proun 99, the large composite object that dominates the upper left quadrant could either be a cube or a recessed meeting of three planes. The gridded triangle at the bottom appears to create a sense of depth, yet the elements above it seem to exist in their own, gravity-less space. Through constructing a complex dimensional space that hovers between the coherent and the impossible, Lissitzky strives to evoke utopia—literally "no place"—and to achieve the task of inventing a new art for a post-revolutionary Soviet society.