Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov, a Russian conceptual artist, was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked in Moscow from the 1950s until the late 1980s, where he was a major figure in the underground community of dissident artists and intellectuals known as the Moscow circle of conceptualists. Kabakov came to the West in the early eighties. He works together with his wife Emilia since 1989. His work has been widely exhibited ever since, and it was featured among others in the 1992 Venice Biennial and the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Ilya Kabakov was named as one of the ten greatest living artists by ArtNews in 2000. He now lives and works on Long Island (New York).

Throughout his career, Kabakov has produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and theoretical texts — not to mention extensive memoirs that track his life from his childhood to the early 1980s. Unlike some underground Soviet artists, Kabakov joined the Union of Soviet Artists in 1959, and became a full-member in 1965. This was a prestigious position in the USSR and it brought with it substantial material benefits. Kabakov illustrated children’s books but spent most of his time on his own projects.
In recent years, he has created installations that evoke the visual culture of the Soviet Union, though this theme has never been the exclusive focus of his work.

By using fictional biographies, many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union, which he claims to be the first modern society to disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov discovers elements common to every modern society, and in doing so he examines the rift between capitalism and communism. Rather than to depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov tends to describe it as one utopian project among many, capitalism included. By reexamining historical narratives and perspectives, Kabakov delivers a message that every project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will to power.

Kabakov’s installations have acted as documents and reminders of a failed socialist project and society. Having experienced a much greater oppression than is commonly known in the West, Ilya Kabakov attempts to nudge the viewer into acknowledging certain authoritarianist aspects of his or her personality but also, and in particular the imagination that might liberate from any kind of previously accepted oppression. His artworks serve as (fictional) stories and biographies that demonstrate universal characteristics within every human.
In the Western art world and an increasingly westernized world, completely removed from the Soviet Union he grew up knowing, Kabakov has grappled to address relevant, and yet still universal, concepts, a typical feature for Kabakov’s style in general being a dreamlike mixture of optimism and melancholy.

In 2006 Deweer Art Gallery presented an exhibition with a series of new paintings and drawings by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, entitled The Thaw (2004-2006). This was not Ilya Kabakovs first show at Deweer Art Gallery. Already in 1992 the gallery presented the installation of the album In Memory of Pleasant Recollections and in 1998 Ilya Kabakov was a guest for the historical double show Jan Fabre & Ilya Kabakov: Een Ontmoeting / Vstrecha / A Meeting.