Ilya Kabakov is known for his immersive installations, paintings, and drawings that tell wry and witty stories about the dreams and inner lives of those who endured the poverty and decadence of the Soviet era in which he grew up. The artist died on May 27 at a hospital near his home. His home and studio in Mattituck on the East End of Long Island, New York. he was 89 years old.
His stepdaughter, Viola Kanevsky, said he was suffering from heart disease.
For decades in Soviet Russia, Kabakov was a well-known children’s book illustrator by day and a state-sponsored artist with his own studio and art supplies (which he shared with underground artist friends). rice field. He produced about 150 children’s books before leaving the country permanently in 1988.
But he also lived a double life as a conceptual artist. In the 1970s he started making what he called albums. This is a series of whimsical drawings and paintings depicting tragic comedy characters imaginatively escaping from the misery and humiliation of the failed utopian experiment of the Soviet Union. His album had a title and scenario that recalled the works of novelists like Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, which satirized the dark life under Stalin’s regime in 1967.
One album, “Sitting in the Closet Primakov,” was about a boy who shut himself up in a closet full of toys and trash but dreams of flying away into the sky. Another was “Agonizing Surikov” about a man who could not see the whole picture of the world in front of him. His view was of a tiny little landscape, a faint blue sky, but it was like looking through a peephole. And in “Marinin the Decorator,” bureaucrats scribbled in the margins of papers during endless, boring meetings that made for a meaningless working life.
“The characters were all part of his own psyche, his frustrations, his fears, his dreams,” said Aimee Wallach, author of the book Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Left Nothing (1996). said over the phone. interview. He then placed his characters in housing known as communal apartments, a typical Soviet-era housing arrangement. There, families were crammed into private rooms hollowed out of what were often grand apartments, sharing bathrooms with strangers and competing for resources and privacy. . It was a metaphor he kept returning to.
The album was drawn in an anonymous style that Kabakov has honed as a prolific state-licensed illustrator. Since it was illegal to show anything other than state-sponsored art, he screened his forbidden works for Eric, a member of the cadre of men and women who became known as the Moscow Conceptualists. It was secretly circulated among artist friends such as Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev. Unlike Western works, their works are based on stories and characters, especially Mr. Kababov.
Kabakhoff told Andrew Solomon, who wrote about him in The New York Times Magazine in 1992, “We always expected to be arrested. We knew something terrible was going to happen. He said. We just drank tea in each other’s kitchens, discussed and criticized each other’s work, and traveled together in the summer. “
Nevertheless, his name began to spread beyond Moscow circles, and small portions of his work were smuggled out of the country and screened in the West. In the mid-1980s, a curator organized an exhibition of his work in Paris. Another was performed in Bern, Switzerland. Mr. Kabakov was also unable to attend.
On the day of the show in Bern, he told Solomon: “I invited all my friends to the forest and tied a red ribbon between two trees. At noon, when I learned that the exhibition was about to begin in the Kunsthalle, we cut the ribbon and drank a bottle of champagne. It was such a bittersweet moment that I could never be there with all this going on.”
By 1988 he was ready to leave. He emigrated to Paris, Austria, before settling on Long Island with the help of his distant cousin Emilia Kanefsky, who became his promoter, producer and collaborator. The two married in 1992 and shared credit for all of Kabakov’s installations in a symbiotic partnership that evokes the bond between Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude over the decades.
“Ilya Kabakov was a secret anthropologist in Soviet society,” wrote critic and curator Robert Stowe in the foreword to Wallach’s book. “Having studied its myths and customs, ironically observed ordinary citizens, and sympathetically analyzed eccentrics, he patiently created an image of a collectivized life that Westerners could understand and that Easterners would certainly recognize. assembled.”
Ilya Josifovich Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipropetrovsk), Ukraine. His mother, Berta Ulyevna Solodkina, was a secretary at a technical school. His father, Joseph Benzionovich Kabakov, was trained as a locksmith and worked as a metal worker in a factory that manufactured bed parts. Like many Soviet citizens in Stalin’s Ukraine, they were extremely poor and malnourished.
When German forces invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the family fled to Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Perhaps by a twist of fate, a prestigious art school was also evacuated to the city. When Ilya was 10 years old, one day he was tricked by an older boy into sneaking into a grand building requisitioned by an art school. When the two were spotted by a woman, the older boy fled and Ilya stood dumbfounded in front of the paintings. It contained dozens of naked women, whose erotic appeal Kabakov later credited as changing his life. The woman encouraged him to enroll in the school, and he was accepted immediately.
When the war ended, Ilya attended another prestigious school – the Surikov Museum in Moscow. His mother did not have the proper paperwork, so she followed him while staying illegally in a series of lousy rooms, including the school toilets, where she found work as a janitor. She and Ilya’s father, a brutal man who beat her son and built a house with other women, separated when he returned from military service.
In 1992, at the ninth documenta, a contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, Kabakov paid tribute to his mother’s tragic experience with an installation called “Toilet”. This installation is a meticulous recreation of the Soviet-style public image. Toilets from the 1960’s and 70’s.
In the work, he created another world in a toilet cubicle with the decorations of a humble but cozy Soviet-era family apartment, complete with toys and furniture. He told an interviewer that the film was “a series of problems: homelessness and defenselessness before the authorities, and an incredibly polite, clean and honest person who has to keep living in the most incredible places.” I’m focusing on the fact that it didn’t happen,” he said.
That same year, Mr. Kabakov seemed ubiquitous, eventually expanding his practice with ambitious installations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ronald Feldman Gallery, as well as exhibitions across Europe.
“He took the West by storm,” Wallach said. The 2013 film Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Entering Here chronicled the couple’s return to Russia in 2008, where he was treated like a national treasure. She added that during perestroika in the late 1980s, “when he finally left, it was just the right time for the West to celebrate a Soviet-born artist of his stature.”
David A. Roth, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, said of Kabakov’s new fame, which Solomon reported in 1992, “It may seem sudden, but he’s always been. must be understood,” he said. After decades of working in obscurity, his life’s work was discovered all at once. Finding him was like bumping into Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg in the prime of their maturity. “
Mr. Kabakov has a wife in addition to his stepdaughter Kanevsky. His daughter, Galina, from his first marriage ended in divorce. Another stepdaughter, Isis Kanevsky. She has four grandchildren. and two great-grandchildren.
From his home in the west, Kabakov and his wife continued to create elaborate installations such as the 2000 ‘Palace of Projects’ exhibition at the Armory in Manhattan after visiting Madrid and London. The “Palace” is a spiral pavilion with a ladder where you can see angels, a ladder where you can see angels, and a healing abode made out of closets.
