Ilya Kabakov, an artist whose expansive works set his sights on the imploded dreams of the Soviet Union, opening up new possibilities for installation art in the process, passed away on Saturday at age 89. His death was announced by his family on the same day.
In vast facilities, Kabakov addressed the many faults of the Soviet Union, where he lived for decades before leaving for the West. By constructing worlds of imagined characters through works of art, Kabakov offered heightened versions of the reality he lived in to viewers around the world.
Kabakov's views were harsh, sad, and explicitly critical of the state, and in this sense were very different from the government-approved art of the Soviet Union. For this reason, he became a giant of the Soviet Union's "unofficial" art scene, secretly—and even dangerously—producing works that existed beyond the mainstream.
These works could not be exhibited in the Soviet Union, but could be performed elsewhere. With the end of the Cold War, Kabakov found success in the West and eventually moved his art production to Russia, where many artists have found inspiration. When Ilya Kabakov and his wife Emilia had a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2018, art historian Claire Bishop called him "the paradigmatic installation artist".
Ilya Kabakov's breakthrough came in 1988, when he became an overnight success after opening a solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. The exhibition that Ilya Kabakov organized, titled "Ten Characters", was a set of installations that simulated the look of the 10-room communal apartment where Ilya Kabakov lived as a child. Shared apartments like this were common among people who could not afford their own housing, and Ilya Kabakov recreated his apartment in the form of rooms inhabited by invisible characters.
"He Who Flew into Space from His Apartment" (1988), the most famous of these, presented a secluded space whose walls were covered with Soviet propaganda images. In the center, hanging under a hole in the ceiling, was an improvised slingshot from which the inhabitant apparently launched himself out of the room.
The exhibition was a critical success. "For this visitor, it beats the movies, every day," wrote John Russell in the New York Times. “The true expression of unadulterated identities is exposed, unprotected by convention,” wrote Kirby Gookin in Artforum.
This type of artistic production contrasted with much of what was being produced in the Soviet Union at the time. "I was not a Russian artist who wanted to show Russian art to the West," Ilya Kabakov once said in an interview with Anton Vidokle, a Russian artist who founded e-flux. "The conceptual position was to look at Soviet life through the eyes of a 'foreigner' who had arrived there."
As Ilya Kabakov's international popularity grew, his facilities expanded in size. "Labyrinth (My Mother's Album)", a 1990 work now owned by the Tate, guides viewers through a labyrinth that pays homage to Kabakov's personal experiences; It even includes audio of your own voice singing Russian songs. When walking through the mostly empty corridors, lit only by hanging lamps, the viewer arrives at the center, a room with nothing but debris. The viewer is left to consider how this compares to the professional photos of the Russian city of Berdyansk displayed in the installation. Taken by your uncle, these images are the ones the Russian government would like to show.
In 1989, Ilya Kabakov began working with his niece, Emilia, whom he later married. Together, they lived in Berlin, then in Paris and finally in New York, where they spent most of their time together. He periodically returned to Moscow, the city where he had lived for decades before all this.
Even after the end of the Soviet Union, Ilya Kabakov continued to produce art about the sense of utopia associated with it. "The fence about communism is gone, so my work is about a world that no longer exists - it's a strange feeling, too, to see the world I lived in for so many years disappear," Ilya Kabakov told the Los Angeles Times in 1995.
Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 1933. When World War II began, his father went off to fight, leaving him alone with his mother, who took him first to the Caucasus and then to Samarkand. As his father did not return after the war, they lived nomadically, ending up in Moscow, where he attended art school at the Surikov Art Institute.
In an interview with the New York Times, Ilya Kabakov recalled: "I learned everything like a monkey, without any feelings. And when I finished, I felt that I was not alive. So I decided to create a masterpiece, in which I could put all my ideas, everything I had ever felt and all the beauty I had ever seen. I believed this work would make me real." Ilya Kabakov began a great painting, but abandoned it.
Publicly, Ilya Kabakov produced more than 100 children's books, which provided him with a living. Privately, during the 1970s and 1980s, Kabakov became a leader of a movement known as Moscow Conceptualism, whose style was flexible enough to avoid censorship. "Responses from an Experimental Group" (1970-71), one of the works produced during this era, features a ready-made hanger alongside a grid of phrases that meditate on artistic creation. Philosopher and art critic Boris Groys, a colleague of Kabakov, admitted that the work was not entirely successful, but still praised it as "liberating", noting that it set him on a new path in his own writing.
Although pieces like this were created largely out of public view, the Ilya Kabakovs' work would eventually be exhibited in Russia. In 2008, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich invested $3 million in renovating a former garage that later became an art center in Moscow, also called the Garage, which showcased a set of installations by the Kabakovs. In the same year, Abramovich attracted attention when he bought one of Ilya Kabakov's paintings for more than $5 million at auction.
In 1995, Kabakov noticed the "steadfast hostility of collectors who have no place to house" his full-fill works, known as "total installations." Things had clearly started to change, which made him uncomfortable. Ilya Kabakov called out the crowd that showed up for the Garage opening.
Alongside the installations, the Kabakovs continued to produce grandiose paintings. However, they were not well received in the West. Claire Bishop wrote in an Artforum review of the Tate Modern show "horrible, disproportionate pseudo-collages whose excessive bombast rivals that of Jeff Koons - but instead of the latter's pornographic Photoshop effects, we had images of socialist realism fragmenting into layers of trompe l'oeil".
Even so, they continued to create their total installations, mainly in the Grand Palais, in Paris, where they carried out the "Monumenta" commission in 2014, filling the entire space with a huge work called "Strange City", which included an immense satellite dish.
Over the years, the Kabakovs' works have been exhibited in many international venues, including several editions of the Venice Biennale and an edition of Documenta, as well as major retrospectives at institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they had a retrospective in 2008.
Ilya Kabakov remained staunchly critical of Russia until the end; The obituary written about Ilya Kabakov by TASS, the Russian state news agency, noted that his foundation's Facebook page is still banned in the country. While Ilya Kabakov didn't say much about the war in Ukraine, Emilia did, calling it "the scariest of wars because it seems possible that it could lead to an all-out nuclear war," in an interview with Art Newspaper in 2022.
Despite the bitterness of their art, the Kabakovs occasionally expressed optimistic sentiments. In 2005, they launched a project called "Ship of Tolerance", a wooden boat whose sails are covered with children's drawings about tolerance. Over the past two decades, Ilya Kabakov has visited Sharjah, Miami, Havana, New York and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt.
"The goal, of course, is connection with other cultures, and the ship is the symbol," Ilya told ARTnews in 2011. "Children are very sensitive to that. Other symbols are the wind, the message in the bottle, the freedom of the sea. Children need to know that their message will be heard."
