About

An endgame study is part of a microcosm, inhabiting a small perfect world where art and science are fused, and mathematical rigour and a clockmaker’s precision are combined with poetic grace and the elegance of a ballerina to forge conceptual beauty. Where repetitive geometric motifs are employed they are a form of kinetic art, where the originality, wit, surprise, economy, thematic content, humour

of the objet d’art offer a vision that transcends chess as a game, placing it into the realms of art. This form of composition employs elements like tempo, space and intensity not unlike that in art, music, and poetry, but instead of an artist’s palette of colour and laws of perspective, or the rhyme and metre in verse, or tone, timbre, or beat in song, the properties of various units of force and spatial harmony

are invoked. This collection of studies samples half a century of output by one of the field's notable and most intriguing practitioners. With a Czech heritage and Ukrainian surname, Emil Melnichenko is New Zealand’s principal composer of endgame studies, of which over 200 are published in international journals spanning the decades since the 1970s. His style is witty and romantic, never failing to delight.