Kabakov Ilya Iosifovich paintings. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not everyone will be taken into the future - Art magazine. Master's area of activity
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Ilya Iosifovich was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk. During wartime, he and his mother were evacuated to Leningrad, where the Art School at the Leningrad Institute of Painting was moved. Repina. At the age of ten, the boy was accepted into this school, and two years later he was transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School. Later, the young man graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow.
In his character and worldview, Kabakov differed sharply from classical artists. Back in the 1960s, he actively exhibited his works at dissident exhibitions in his country and abroad, and later worked in the workshop of Hulo Sooster, famous for its art unrecognized by society.
In the 1970s, he began working on several series of paintings dedicated to life in communal apartments and the housing office. And in the 1980s, he became interested in the installations that were emerging in those years and became the leader of Soviet conceptualism. The installations opened new perspectives for Kabakov. He first received a grant from Austria and built the installation “Before Dinner” there, then a scholarship from France and Germany. Since 1988, the artist has been constantly working abroad.
In the 1990s, Kabakov received worldwide recognition. His works have been exhibited at numerous exhibitions in Europe and the USA. In Russia, the last exhibitions were held in 2004 in St. Petersburg, in 2012 and 2017 in Moscow. In the 21st century, the artist received the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria, the Imperial Prize from Japan, the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from France, the Order of Friendship from Russia and other awards.
Currently, Ilya Kabakov is considered the most famous Russian artist in the West. His works are in the largest museums in Russia and the USA, are regularly presented at exhibitions, and during auctions have repeatedly sold for amounts exceeding a million dollars (more on this later). In recent years, he has often worked in collaboration with his wife Emilia.
Master's area of activity
The concept of “Moscow conceptualism” appeared in 1979. Representatives of this trend declared works of art as a means by which the essence of art was studied. To this end, conceptualists created installations (more about them below), held events and studied people’s reactions to them, and also motivated society to discuss the problems of art.
In addition to installations, Kabakov influenced viewers by introducing text into his paintings. This is how the works “Answers from the experimental group”, “Where are they?” appeared. and others. Conceptual works also include the artist's albums - images with text, united by one theme.
Another distinctive feature of Kabakov’s work is his work on behalf of fictional characters: socialist realist hacks, invented artists, etc.
Total installations
Having moved abroad in the late 1980s, Kabakov had the opportunity to bring his grandiose projects to life. Over two decades, the artist managed to create more than five hundred installations, which he called total.
The installations represent worlds constructed by the artist that the viewer can see and feel from the inside. For example, the famous installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room” is a room with a broken ceiling, in the center of which a device has been created to break out, and on the walls there are pictures that help to understand the state of the person living in it. This installation symbolized the desire of Soviet people to break out of the shackles of the communal apartment that oppresses them and the country that oppresses them with its demands and ideals.
In 2006, this installation was shown at the Guggenheim Museum (New York) along with works by such famous Russian artists as, which contributed not only to the growth of Kabakov’s popularity, but also to secure his status as an important representative of the artistic community.
Records at auctions, price of Kabakov’s paintings
Ilya Iosifovich is considered the most expensive living Russian artist. Let's find out how much Kabakov's paintings cost on the modern art market.
Let's start with the work "Dog", presented at the auction of the famous auction house Phillips. This is a diptych created using enamel on canvas, demonstrating the game of mockumentary. On the left side, the artist shows carefully transcribed personal data of a fictional Soviet character, and on the right, a dog, symbolizing a small man in the face of a huge bureaucratic apparatus.
The work was exhibited at an exhibition in New York in 1990. It was a success at the auction and, with a preliminary estimate of 300-500 thousand pounds sterling, went for 458 thousand pounds (662 thousand dollars).
The next major sales include the departure of the works “Holidays No. 6” and “Holidays No. 10”. These are works from the “Holidays” series, consisting of 12 paintings. According to the artist's plan, the paintings in this series should be hung in a littered room with overturned chairs and tables. The work "Holidays No. 6" was sold at Sotheby's in 2013 for 962 thousand pounds ($1.5 million) with an estimate of 0.8-1.2 million pounds.
The painting “Holidays No. 10” was sold at Phillips in 2011 for one and a half million pounds ($2.4 million) at the lower end of the estimate. Since 1987, it has been exhibited at many exhibitions around the world.
The work “Luxury Room” sold for even more money at the Phillips auction in 2007. The artist created a diptych in his characteristic pictorial manner, depicting a luxury room and superimposing on it the text of an advertisement for Black Sea resorts. The work was a huge success at the auction and, with an estimate of 400-600 thousand pounds, went for 2 million pounds ($4 million).
Finally, the sale of the work “Beetle” at the same Phillips auction in 2008 is considered a record. This is an almost photographic image of a beetle on a leaf, accompanied by a nursery rhyme in the style of Kabakov. The beetle symbolizes a person who wants to remain free from any framework, including the framework of painting. This work was repeatedly presented at exhibitions, and was also included in catalogs and books about Moscow conceptualism and the art of Soviet oppositionist artists.
Although a year earlier the work “Luxury Room” sold for 2 million pounds, the departure of “Beetle” became a sensation, because the original estimate of 1.2-1.8 million pounds was doubled. The painting was auctioned for 2.9 million pounds ($5.8 million), becoming the artist’s most expensive work.
If we talk about lower-priced departures, then they also happen regularly at various auctions. For example, at the Phillips auction the following paintings were sold: “Solemn painting” (241 thousand dollars), “We are ready to fly” (29 thousand dollars), at Christie’s “Battle in the apartment (68 thousand euros), “How to meet with an angel" (24 thousand pounds), "Two Friends" (250 pounds), at Sotheby's "Mushroom Pickers" (9 thousand pounds), "Window" (5 thousand pounds) and others.
Returning to the question of how much Kabakov’s paintings cost, we can conclude that they are very popular on the painting market and often go over the estimate. Specific pieces fetch varying prices from a few hundred to several million dollars. In the next section we will look at how and where to sell Kabakov’s painting.
Examination and sale of paintings by Kabakov
How to evaluate Kabakov's painting
Previously, we found out that there is a significant variation in price in the artist’s works. In order not to miscalculate the cost of a particular work, we recommend ordering a professional examination. This procedure involves examining the picture according to a variety of parameters and can be partial or complex. In the case of partial research, one or more of the most significant parameters are assessed, for example, the authenticity of the painting is confirmed. A comprehensive study of many characteristics will help. It is especially in demand if the work claims a high price.
How and where to sell Kabakov’s painting
Ilya Kabakov. Self-portrait, 1962
Oil on canvas, 605 × 605 mm
Private collection. Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Venues and dates:
Tate Modern, London. October 18, 2017 – January 28, 2018
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. April 21, 2018 – July 29, 2018
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. September 6, 2018 – January 13, 2019
In the fall, the retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Not everyone will be taken into the future” opened at the Tate Modern museum of contemporary art (London). The monographic project was the result of collaboration between three museums - Tate Modern, the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery, so after the completion of the London stage, the exhibition will be presented in the spring in St. Petersburg and in the fall in Moscow. The name, structure and main composition of the exhibition, according to the concept, will remain the same for all three sites.
The Tate exhibition is a classic museum monograph: the viewer moves from early works to later ones, tracing the evolution of Kabakov's method and ideas - from painting to graphic albums, and then to total installations. One of the earliest and most important works in the introductory section of the exhibition is “Self-Portrait” (1962, private collection), where the author depicted himself wearing a pilot’s hat. Written in a conventional artistic language, “Self-Portrait” is important because it is the last strictly pictorial work of Kabakov, created by him in the twentieth century. During the short thaw period, Kabakov became interested in Cezanne’s cubist system, visited Falk’s studio, but already in the 70s he radically left painting, only to return to it thirty years later - in the 2000s, but with a completely different conceptual approach. Contemporary paintings, already signed with the names of Ilya and Emilia, are presented in the second part of the exhibition. These are large-scale canvases from the “collage” series “Two Times” and “Dark and Light”. In these works, the Kabakovs “collide” the template subjects of socialist realist art—the harvest or pioneer meetings—with fragments of classical painting, creating the effect of split time. The evolution of Kabakov’s artistic method from “Self-Portrait” to late painting becomes one of the connecting lines in the general chronology of the exhibition.
At the end of the 60s, Kabakov’s attitude towards the painting changed fundamentally - he began to consider it as an object. In the work “Hand and Reproduction of Ruisdael” (1965, private collection), the artist combines ready-made objects - a reproduction of the painting by the Dutch artist “The Raid”, a dummy hand and a white frame. Collected together, these objects lose their function and become artistic symbols, to the creation of which the author literally and figuratively has a hand. In addition, already in the early 70s, Kabakov began to explore the language and style of formal communication. During this period, he used hardboard as a canvas, a sheet building material on which announcements, schedules and news were usually placed. According to Kabakov’s recollections, when a commission came to his workshop on Sretensky Boulevard, everyone immediately understood that he was carrying out a municipal task. Although in the works “Answers of the experimental group” (1970-71, private collection), “Nikolai Petrovich” (1980, private collection) and “By December 25 in our area ...” (1983, Center Pompidou) hardboard retains its associative meaning, the viewer I learned here the characters of Kabakov’s characters, insignificant details of their life and life tragedies.
Ilya Kabakov. The appearance of collage No. 10, 2012
Oil on canvas, 2030 × 2720 mm
Private collection. Ilya & Emilia Kabakov. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery
In the 80s, Kabakov began to create works only from objects - he later defined them as total installations. The revolutionary nature of the genre lay in the fact that the work of art acquired the format of a “place” with its own boundaries of conventional space. Kabakov managed to realize the idea of a total installation in full only after moving in 1989, first to Europe and then to the USA, and the semantic center of the monographic exhibition at the Tate became the installation “Not everyone will be taken into the future” (2001, Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo), for the first time shown in 2001 at the 49th exhibition of the Venice Biennale. This work is of the same name as one of Kabakov’s texts, which is dedicated to the important topic of the artist’s professional path for him. Entering the installation room, the viewer finds himself in a dimly lit, deserted railway station. On the platform there are paintings abandoned by someone. A train arrives, instead of the destination station there is a running line “Not everyone will be taken into the future,” and the viewer cannot say what the fate of the works left on the platform is.
A completely different role was assigned to the viewer in the earlier installation “Labyrinth. My Mother's Album (1992, Tate Modern), where he has to walk to the end of a long, dimly lit corridor. On the walls are collages of photographs, postcards and texts in dark frames, representing fragments of the life story of the artist’s mother. The viewer wanders through the labyrinths of memory, and he no longer has to answer questions, but goes to the end of the entire long path, plunging him into a certain psycho-emotional state. Perhaps it is this work that makes the strongest impression on English viewers, although the exhibition includes “The Man Who Flew from His Room into Space” (1985, Center Pompidou) and the famous “Ten Characters” (1970-1976).
The central theme “Not everyone will be taken into the future” sounds especially poignant in the last room, where a model of the installation “How to Meet an Angel?” is presented. (1998—2002, private collection). It was installed in 2003 in a public park in Germany, and its version in 2009 was installed on the roof of a psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands. The constructivist staircase, which leads upward from the city, promises salvation to every wanderer who has overcome the path. The staircase becomes an image of the road to another, “higher” world, a means of finding hope and an opportunity to see a miracle with your own eyes. The theme of personal utopia stated in the title of the project ends, according to the Kabakovs themselves, with this work, which offers the viewer a way out of the world, which the artists see as a total installation.
February 15, 2019
Awards of Ilya Kabakov
2002 - Oscar Kokoschka Award.
The works of Ilya Kabakov
Paintings:
1980 - “Little Merman”
1981 - “Luxury Room”
1982 - “Beetle”
1987 - “Vacation No. 10”
2012 - “The Emergence of Collage”
Installations:
1986 - “Ten Characters”
1991 - “Red Car”
1992 - “Toilet”
1994 - “The Artist Despair”
2003 - “Conversation with an Angel”
2003 - “Where is Our Place”
2014 - “The Strange City”
Works are in collections
ART4 Museum, Moscow.
Collection of Igor Markin
Solo exhibitions
Family of Ilya Kabakov
30.09.2019
Kabakov Ilya Iosifovich
Russian Artist
Foreign honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts
Ilya Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933 in the city of Dnepr, Ukraine. The boy grew up in the family of mechanic Joseph Bentsionovich and accountant Bella Yudelevna. In 1941, together with his mother, he was evacuated to Samarkand. Two years later, he was accepted into the Art School at the St. Petersburg Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Repin, whose teachers and students were also evacuated to Samarkand.
In 1945, Ilya transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School. Which he graduated in 1951 and then entered the graphics department at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after Vasily Surikov, where he studied in the book workshop of Professor Boris Dekhterev. In his final year in 1956, Ilya began illustrating books for the Detgiz publishing house and for the magazines Malysh, Murzilka, and Funny Pictures. A year later I received a diploma from the institute.
Further, in the 1960s he was an active participant in dissident art exhibitions in the Soviet Union and abroad. In 1968, Kabakov moved to the later famous workshop of Hulo Sooster in the attic of the former apartment building "Russia" on Sretensky Boulevard. At the same time, together with Oleg Vasiliev, Erik Bulatov and other nonconformists, he participated in an exhibition at the Blue Bird cafe.
In 1970, Kabakov became a member of the Sretensky Boulevard artists' association in Moscow. In the mid-1970s, he made a conceptual triptych of three white canvases and began the “alb” cycle: sheets with inscriptions on “communal” themes, and since 1978 he has been developing the ironic “Zhekovsky series”. In the 1970s, he drew 55 albums for the Ten Characters series.
In the Olympic year for Moscow, 1980, Kabakov was less involved in graphics and focused exclusively on installations in which he used ordinary garbage and played up the life and everyday life of communal apartments. In 1982, Kabakov came up with one of his most famous installations: “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room,” completed by 1986. Subsequently, such large-scale projects began to be called “total installations.”
Ilya Iosifovich, in 1987, received the first foreign grant from the Austrian association Graz Kunstverein, and also built the “Dinner” installation in Graz. A year later, he staged the first “total installation” from the “Ten Characters” project at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and received a scholarship from the French Ministry of Culture. In 1989, Kabakov was given a scholarship by the DAAD Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and in the same year the artist moved to Berlin. From that time on, he constantly worked outside of Russia.
Since the early 1990s, Kabakov has had dozens of exhibitions in Europe and America, including in such major museums as the Paris Pompidou Center, the Norwegian National Center for Contemporary Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Cologne Kunsthalle, as well as at the Venice Biennale and Documenta exhibition in Kassel.
The time for recognition of the artist came only in 1990. Over the past decade, he received awards from Danish, German and Swiss museums, and the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture.
Since the 2000s, he began to actively exhibit in Russia. In the fall of 2003, the Moscow House of Photography showed the project “Ilya Kabakov. Photo and video documentation of life and creativity.” At the beginning of 2004, the Tretyakov Gallery organized the program exhibition “Ilya Kabakov. Ten characters." In June 2004, an exhibition of Ilya Kabakov and his wife Emilia, with whom he had been married since 1989, “An Incident in the Museum and Other Installations,” opened in the Hermitage in the General Staff Building, which marked their return to their homeland. At the same time, the artists donated two installations to the museum.
In December 2004, the Moscow gallery Stella Art showed nine installations by Kabakov made over the previous ten years. When the program exhibition “Russia!” went to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2006, it included Kabakov’s installation “The Man Who Flew into Space.” The presence of this work in the same space with icons of Andrei Rublev and Dionysius, paintings by Bryullov, Repin and Malevich finally cemented Kabakov’s status as one of the most important Russian artists of the post-war generation.
In the summer of 2007, at a London auction at Phillips de Pury & Company, Kabakov’s painting “Luxury Room” was purchased for 2 million pounds sterling, which is about 4 million dollars. After this, Kabakov became the most expensive Russian artist of the second half of the twentieth century. In February 2008, Kabakov’s work “Beetle” was auctioned by Phillips de Pury & Company for £2.93 million. In April of the same year, the album “Flying Komarov” was sold at Sotheby's New York auction for 445 thousand dollars.
In the fall of 2008, the largest retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov was shown in Moscow. The exhibition was demonstrated at three venues at once: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, and the Garage Center for Contemporary Art.
In 2018, on the occasion of Ilya Kabakov’s 85th birthday, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art released the film “Poor People”: a story about the biography and artistic world of the master, his attitude to creativity and life.
In August 2018, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov donated their workshop to the Tretyakov Gallery. Soon, February 15, 2019 The Tretyakov Gallery announced the opening of a museum for the artist Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov.
Awards of Ilya Kabakov
2002 - Oscar Kokoschka Award.
2008 - Imperial Prize of Japan, awarded to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in the sculpture category.
2008 - Order of Friendship (October 29, 2008, Russia) - for his great contribution to the preservation, development and popularization of Russian culture abroad.
2015 - Award For Excellence in Arts, Appraisers Association of America, Inc., New York, USA
2014 - Commandeur De L"Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres,Ministery de la Culture, France
2014 - Gold Medal For Achievements in Art, The National Art Club, New York, USA
2013 - Medals for Life Achievements in Art, Moscow Art Academy, Moscow, Russia
2011 - Louise Blouin Foundation Award, presented at The Louise Blouin Creative Leadership Summit, October 15, 2011
2010 - Cartier Prize from Art Masters, St. Moritz, Switzerland
2008 - The Praemium Imperiale, Japan, The Japan Art Association/The Order of Friendship, The President of Russian Federation, Russia
2008 - Honorary Academics of Moscow Art Academy, Moscow, Russia
2007 - Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa, Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy, University of Sorbonne, Paris, France
2002 - Oskar Kokoschka Preis, Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, Vienna - Austria.
2000 - Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy), University of Bern, Bern - Switzerland
1998 - Kaiserring der Stadt Goslar, Goslar - Germany.
1997 - AICA Best Show Award (Best Installation in a Gallery, Museum or Specific Site for “The Life of Flies” at Gladstone Gallery, International Art Critic Association, New York/NY - U.S.A.
1995 - Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture et de la Francophonie, Paris - France.
1993 - Honorary Diploma, Biennale di Venezia, Venice - Italy.
1993 - Max Beckmann-Preis der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main - Germany.
1992 - Arthur Köpcke Award, Köpcke Foundation, Copenhagen - Denmark.
1990 - Kunstpreis Aachen, Freunde des Ludwig Forums fur Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany
1989 - DAAD Fellowship, Artists-in-Residence Program of the German Academic Exchange Service, Berlin - Germany.
The works of Ilya Kabakov
Paintings:
1972 - “Answers from the experimental group”
1980 - “Trash Bin Schedule”
1980 - “Little Merman”
1981 - “Luxury Room”
1982 - “Beetle”
1987 - “Vacation No. 10”
1992 - “E. Korobova says: No need to screw it in: I’ve already tried that”
2012 - “The Emergence of Collage”
2015 - “Six paintings about temporary loss of vision (painting a boat)”
Installations:
1980 - “The man who flew into space from his room”
1986 - “Ten Characters”
1988 - “The Man Who Never Threw Away”
1989 - “An incident in the corridor near the kitchen”
1990 - “Labyrinth (my mother’s album)”
1991 - “Red Car”
1992 - “Toilet”
1994 - “The Artist Despair”
1998 - “The Palace of Projects”
1999 - “Monument to a Lost Civilization”
2001 - “Not everyone will be taken into the future”
2003 - “Conversation with an Angel”
2003 - “Where is Our Place”
2014 - “The Strange City”
Works are in collections
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow;
ART4 Museum, Moscow.
Collection of Igor Markin
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art, Kolodzei Art Foundation, USA
Solo exhibitions
2017 - “Not everyone will be taken into the future. Retrospective". Tate Modern - State Hermitage - Tretyakov Gallery, London - St. Petersburg - Moscow
2012 - “Monument to a Vanished Civilization.” Gallery “Red October”, Moscow.
2004 - “An Incident in the Museum” and other installations. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
1995 - “Without Water”, permanent exhibition, Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna, Austria
1995 - “An incident in a museum or the music of water”, Center for Contemporary Art at Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal
1995 - “Kabakov: Sea of Voices”, permanent exhibition, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
1995 - “School Library”, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland
1995 - “Change of Scene VIII”, Museum for Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
1995 - “Crest Ici que Nous Vivons”, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
1995 - “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment”, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
1995 - “The Man Who Never Threw Nothing Away”, permanent exhibition, National Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway
1994 - “Kabakov: Operating Room (Mother and Son)”, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway
1994 - “River of the Golden Underground, The Boat of My Life, My Mother’s Album”, Center National DrArt Contemporain, Grenoble, France
1994 - “Ilya Kabakov: Operating Room (Mother and Son)”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
1993 - “Moscow Conceptual Cycle”, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany
1993 - “An incident in a museum or the music of water”, music. Vladimir Tarasov, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA
1993 - “Red Pavilion”, music by Vladimir Tarasov, Venice Biennale, Italy
1993 - “Big Archive”, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland
1992 - “Painting Miraculous”, Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany
1992 - “Illustration as a way of survival”, exhibition in memory of Hulo Sooster, Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Belgium
1992 - “Life in Flight”, Kolnicher Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany
1991 - “Three Exhibitions of Ten Characters”, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada
1991 - “Ship”, Neue Galerie of the Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany
1991 - “Seven exhibitions of one painting”, Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, Germany
1991 - Selected works from "Ten Images", Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, USA
1989 - “Whiteness covers everything”, De Appel, Amsterdam, Holland
1989 - “Communal Apartment - Ship”, Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland
1989 - “New building (Talentless artist and other images - installation)”, together with E. Bulatov, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England
1988 - “Before Dinner”, Kunstverein, Graz, Austria; together with E. Bulatov, Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany
1987 - “60s - 70s” together with I. Chuikov, Museum of Modern Art, Basel, Switzerland
Family of Ilya Kabakov
The first wife is Irina Rubanova (born 1933), philologist, polonist, researcher at the Institute of Art History (now the State Institute of Art History).
Daughter - Galina, anthropologist, associate professor of Slavic studies at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne).
Second wife - Victoria Mochalova (born 1946), philologist, polonist, head of the Center for Slavic-Judaic Studies at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Her first marriage was to the writer B. M. Nosik. He raised his stepson Anton Nosik.
Third wife (1989) - Emilia Kabakova (née Lekah; born 1945, Dnepropetrovsk). Since 1988, the artist and his wife have lived in New York.
Conceptualist Ilya Kabakov became the first artist to reveal to Western audiences the ugliness of Soviet life, and primarily the life of a communal apartment. The means of immersion in the amazing linguistic and social environment of the communal apartment were total installations, which Kabakov began to invent in the early 1980s, but was able to implement only in emigration. In an interview, he repeatedly said that the only way to avoid the destruction of his own personality in everyday conflicts with communal neighbors was to go into his own world, where the bestial conditions of existence could be ridiculed with the help of witty comparisons, especially since only a catapult could help escape from the communal apartment.
The most famous are two of Kabakov’s total installations dedicated to communal life. Firstly, “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room” (1982): this is the same unknown tenant who managed to eject. Thus, on the one hand, he realized the Soviet dream of conquering space, and on the other, he avoided a humiliating existence in a communal apartment. And secondly, “Toilet” is a famous installation from 1992, in which a cozy Soviet living room is located in the same room as a disgusting public toilet.
Ilya Kabakov in the studio. Photo by Igor Palmin. 1975 Igor PalminThe communal apartment turned out to be that for me The central plot, which for Gorky was the overnight stay in the play “At the Lower Depths.” The shelter is an extremely successful metaphor, because it is like looking into a pit where myriads of souls are swarming. Nothing happens in the play: everyone talks there. Our Soviet, Russian life, in the same way, gravitates towards places that are zones of speaking. And now the communal apartment turns into a Soviet version of “At the Lower Depths.”
The communal apartment I work with this is a kind of mandala - with its corridors, rooms, kitchen, stoves, tables, through which colossal energy passes, and I, of course, feed on this energy, which is in a state of constant pulsation - like inhalation and exhalation.
The communal apartment is a good metaphor for Soviet life, because it is impossible to live in it, but it is also impossible to live differently, because it is almost impossible to leave the communal apartment. This combination—you can’t live like this, but you can’t live any other way either—well describes the Soviet situation as a whole. The remaining forms of Soviet life (including, for example, the camp) are just different versions of the communal apartment. I think that for a Westerner it is simply incomprehensible how people can doom themselves to such torment as almost everyone living in communal apartments - I became convinced of this when I made my installations on this topic in the West. For everyone to cook in the same kitchen, go to the same toilet... It just doesn’t fit in my head.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. "In the communal kitchen." 1991 Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Bildrecht, Vienna 2014 Central spaces of a communal apartment- this is the corridor and the kitchen. Through the corridor, everyone knows what is going on with the neighbors. And the kitchen is not only a place for cooking, but also a kind of agora, where general meetings take place, decisions are made that affect all residents, and meetings with government representatives are held. Quarrels, fights or repentances also occur there.
Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru The world behind the walls communal apartments are beautiful and united. Only we live fragmented, we are shit. This was the case under Stalin. The loudspeaker was very important - Levitan and cheerful voices. In the communal apartment it sounded: “The morning is beautiful...”, that is, the positive is continuous from the loudspeaker. And here you, ..., peed in the restroom and could not, ..., clean up after yourself, and who will clean up after you? And at this moment the following is heard: “Moscow is my, my country.” Moreover, this acts subconsciously. There is paradise, there are young, young creatures going to the physical parade. And here you are... living like a dog. Shame on you! This is a form of shaming.
Surrounding reality- it was a sad, swine savagery. The contrast between these oases - the Pushkin Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Conservatory, several libraries - and the everyday savagery that was Soviet life provided fertile ground for artistic work.
It was impossible to live in the Soviet Union and do not distance yourself from the general savagery. Irony was the distance. When reading books, you looked at your surroundings from the point of view of what you read. There could be different attitudes to this: either ethnographic, when you felt like a messenger of the English Geographical Club in Africa, looking at the life of cannibals, or angry: “Why do I need such a dog’s life?” This is despair. And there was a third thing - feeling like Gogol’s little man. Despite the fact that you are under pressure, you have your ideals, your overcoat, your squeaking self-awareness. On the one hand, you are an observer, on the other hand, you are a patient. What the current generation does not know is the insane fear that they will pull you out, hit you, and imprison you. This fear is difficult to describe today.
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Fragment of the installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Memories of a communal kitchen”© Museum of Contemporary Art Art4.ru
Any communal text in one form or another - on an automatic, unconscious level - it is saturated with concepts and terms that penetrate from this big world, primarily in a huge number of impersonal pronouns that shock foreigners so much. These are “they”, “it”, “we have” and generally impersonal forms: they come, they will come, it is accepted. That is, a huge number of sayings that are not, in principle, related to the specific inhabitants of the communal apartment. For example, “they didn’t deliver,” “threw away,” “it didn’t work today”—forms of insufficiency, uncertainty, hope, and so on. In a word, the big world appears in the form of indefinite texts. Example: “Today they didn’t deliver fresh bread, it was a waste of time.” That is, this text is constructed classically, because “they didn’t bring it.” “Today the batteries are cold again. And yesterday, I saw, they unloaded the coal, right in the middle of the yard, and then Petka was all dirty.” That is, the external world appears in the forms of only passive verb forms. I'm not even talking about forms of eviction, repairs - “it” does all this. In general, the extent of the helplessness of communal life in front of the outside world is terrifying. No one in a communal apartment will nail the boards or fix the faucet, because all these functions are performed by “it”. When a lamp burns out or a board in the hallway rots, you need to report it to the Housing Office.
Speech, pain and hysteria are the companions of the existence of a communal kitchen.
Any form of sexual language are forbidden. In communal speech there is a very high degree of pressure from the imperative of “higher” principles.<…>Every text seems to be addressed on behalf of some very high authorities. “We don’t behave like that.” "People don't do that." “A decent person doesn’t do that, only a pig does that,” and the like. All this means that you are violating well-known behavioral and speech norms. Therefore, sexuality fits the same standard as theft. It's like a form... in general. In short, communal norms imply the presence of some very high imperative, and everyone appeals to this supra-communal “I”, “super-ego”. But it's asexual.
Ilya Kabakov installs the installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room” Perry van Duijnhoven / flickr.com 
Installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov “Toilet” at the Documenta festival. 1992 JM Group We lived in a communal apartment, and everyone walked in the same toua-let... Lord! How can I build and maintain a wall between myself and others, and so that “they,” these others, only appear above the edge of this wall, but do not jump towards me here, inside the space fenced off from them? (From the annotation for the 2004 exhibition “Toilet.”)
Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk. His mother, Berta Solodukhina, was an accountant, and his father, Joseph Kabakov, was a mechanic. In 1941, together with his mother, he was evacuated to Samarkand. In 1943, he was accepted into the Art School at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Repin, whose teachers and students were also evacuated to Samarkand. From there, Kabakov was transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School (MSHS) in 1945. He graduated from it in 1951 and at the same time entered the graphics department at the Surikov Institute (Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov), where he studied in the book workshop of Professor B.A. Dekhtereva. Graduated from the Kabakov Institute in 1957.
Since 1956, Ilya Kabakov began illustrating books for the publishing house "Detgiz" (since 1963 - "Children's Literature") and for the magazines "Malysh", "Murzilka", "Funny Pictures". From the second half of the 1950s, he began to paint “for himself”: he tried his hand at such directions as abstract art and surrealism.
In the 1960s, Kabakov was an active participant in dissident art exhibitions in the Soviet Union and abroad.
In 1968, Kabakov moved to the studio of Hulo Sooster, which later became famous, in the attic of the former apartment building "Russia" on Sretensky Boulevard. In the same 1968, he, along with Oleg Vasiliev, Erik Bulatov and other nonconformists, participated in an exhibition at the Blue Bird cafe.
Some of the artist’s works were already included in the exhibition “Alternative Reality II” (L’Aquila, Italy) in 1965, and from the early 1970s they were included in exhibitions of Soviet unofficial art organized in the West: in Cologne, London, Venice.
From 1970 to 1976, Kabakov painted 55 albums for the Ten Characters series. The first album was "Flying Komarov". The cycle, which journalists later called a “conceptualist comic,” was created specifically for home viewing: it was a nonconformist, unofficial project.
In the mid-1970s, Kabakov made a conceptual triptych of three white canvases and began a series of “albs” - sheets with inscriptions on “communal” themes, and since 1978 he has been developing the ironic “Zhekovsky series”. In 1980, he began to work less with graphics and focused on installations in which he used ordinary garbage and depicted the life and everyday life of communal apartments.
In 1982, Kabakov came up with one of his most famous installations, “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room,” completed by 1986. Subsequently, he began to call such large-scale projects “total installations.”
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In 1987, Kabakov received his first foreign grant - from the Austrian association Graz Kunstverein - and built the installation "Dinner" in Graz. A year later, he staged the first "total installation" of the Ten Characters project at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and received a fellowship from the French Ministry of Culture. In 1989, Kabakov was given a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and moved to Berlin. From that time on, he constantly worked outside the borders of first the USSR and then Russia.
Since the early 1990s, Kabakov has had dozens of exhibitions in Europe and America, including in such major museums as the Paris Pompidou Center, the Norwegian National Center for Contemporary Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Cologne Kunsthalle, as well as at the Venice Biennale and at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel.
The 1990s became a time of recognition for the artist: in this decade he received awards from Danish, German and Swiss museums, and the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture.
In the 2000s, the artist began to actively exhibit in Russia. Thus, in the fall of 2003, the Moscow House of Photography showed the project “Ilya Kabakov. Photo and video documentation of life and creativity.” At the beginning of 2004, the Tretyakov Gallery organized a program exhibition "Ilya Kabakov. Ten Characters."
In June 2004, an exhibition of Ilya Kabakov and his wife Emilia (they have been married since 1992) “An Incident in the Museum and Other Installations” opened in the Hermitage General Staff Building, which “marked their return to their homeland.” At the same time, the artists donated two installations to the museum, which, according to Mikhail Piotrovsky, marked the beginning of the Hermitage collection of contemporary art. In December of the same 2004, the Moscow gallery "Stella-Art" showed nine installations by Kabakov, made in 1994-2004.
When the program exhibition "Russia!" went to New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2006, it included Kabakov's installation "The Man Who Flew into Space." The presence of this work in the same space with icons of Andrei Rublev and Dionysius, paintings by Bryullov, Repin and Malevich finally cemented Kabakov’s status as one of the most important Soviet and Russian artists of the post-war generation.
In the summer of 2007, at a London auction at Phillips de Pury & Company, Kabakov’s painting “Luxury Room” was purchased for 2 million pounds sterling (about $4 million). So he became the most expensive Russian artist of the second half of the twentieth century.
In February 2008, Kabakov's work "Beetle" (1982) was auctioned by Phillips de Pury & Company for £2.93 million ($5.84 million). In April of the same year, the album "Flying Komarov" was sold at Sotheby's New York auction for 445 thousand dollars.
In July 2008, it became known about the largest retrospective of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov being prepared in Moscow, designed for three venues at once: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art and the new Garage Center for Contemporary Art, which will be opened by Daria Zhukova with the support of Roman Abramovich. It was reported that initially the exhibition was to be financed by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation; the amount intended for the project was named - $2 million. But on June 5, the foundation refused to support Kabakov’s exhibition.
It is known that Ilya Kabakov was a member of the Union of Artists and was a member of the book graphics section. In September 2008, Kabakov became a laureate of the Japanese Imperial Prize Premium Imperiale. Emilia Kabakova stated that the monetary part of the award will be divided into three parts, one of which is intended for the Life Line Foundation for the purchase of equipment and treatment of children suffering from heart disease, the second for the construction of a children's library, and the third part should be donated to a nursing home.
Kabakov has three daughters.