Ilya Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov 2017

Ilja Iosifovič Kabakov ( Russian Илья Иосифович Кабаков , scientific transliteration Il'ja Iosifovič Kabakov ; born September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk , Soviet Union ) is a painter and conceptual artist of Russian-Jewish origin. During his creative period in the Soviet Union, he was an important representative of "Moscow Conceptualism" ( Московский концептуализм ). He has lived in New York since he emigrated from the USSR in 1988 . He works together with his wife Emilia Kabakow as an artist couple. They are represented by the ARNDT gallery in Berlin, the Brigitte Schenk gallery in Cologne and the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Salzburg and Paris.

Life

Plastic And you look up and read the words in Münster / Westphalia

Kabakov was born as the son of the accountant Bella Yudelevna Soloduchina and the locksmith Iossif Benzionowitsch Kabakow in Dnepropetrovsk, a city in the Ukrainian SSR . 1941, during the Second World War , fought as Kabakov father at the front, he and his mother were to Samarkand ( Uzbekistan ) evacuated. His father died in the war. In 1943 he became a student at the art school of the Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts, which had also been evacuated to Samarkand. After the end of the war he went to Moscow for training, where he was trained as a draftsman according to the principles of socialist realism . In addition, he dealt with Cézanne and, as far as possible, with currents of Western art, and he made drawing studies based on nature. In 1951 he completed his studies with a diploma as an illustrator. For the next few years he worked as a children's book illustrator. In 1965 he became a member of the Artists' Union of the USSR. From 1967 Kabakov lived in an attic apartment in the center of Moscow, which soon became the center of the dissident Moscow art scene.

From 1978 onwards he created his first screen walls with texts in which he parodied official Soviet art. He subsequently expanded the technique of collage in his installations . His story of the man who never threw anything away began in 1981 , an installation of various boxes with papers, sheet music and all kinds of everyday trash.

With no chance of his work being exhibited in the USSR, however, Kabakov's drawings and other works soon found their way to the West in an adventurous way. His very first exhibition took place in Switzerland in 1985 at the Kunsthalle Bern. Under the title Ilya Kabakov: In the margin , 25 pictures and 490 drawings were exhibited.

Installation The fallen chandelier , in the foyer of the Hochhaus zur Palme in Zurich

In 1987 he received a three-month scholarship from the Kunstverein Graz, which enabled him to spend his first time in the West, from which he never returned to the Soviet Union . In 1989 he received a scholarship from the DAAD and in the same year his work was shown at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Since 1988 he has lived and worked mainly in New York, together with his wife Emilia Kabakow, who emigrated to Israel in 1973 and then to the USA in 1975. From 1992 to 1993 he taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. In 1992, works were shown at Documenta IX in Kassel . In 1990 Kabakow received the Aachen Art Prize , the Max Beckmann Prize in 1993 , the Swiss Joseph Beuys Prize and the honorary diploma at the Venice Biennale . In 1998 he was awarded the Goslarer Kaiserring .

The works of the Kabakovs are shown in galleries and museums all over the western world as well as in Russia. Ilja Kabakow often writes extensive, independent text volumes on the installations. Kabakow is an extremely successful exhibition artist with a considerable number of exhibitions every year.

Since his dissident period in Moscow, his conceptual art , which initially focused on reflections on the Russian mentality, social conditions and daily problems of people in the USSR, and in which he later basically dealt with utopian building designs and social utopias, has been of great importance diverse influence on contemporary artists.

Exhibitions (selection)

1986: Am Rande , Düsseldorfer Kunstverein

1988: 10 albums , Portikus, Frankfurt am Main

1989: The ship, the communal apartment , Kunsthalle Zürich

1989: Who are these little men , Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

1990: He lost his mind, ran away, naked , Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

1991: 52 entretiens dans la cuisine communautaire , (traveling exhibition), Art Transit, Marseille

1992: The Life of Flies , Cologne Art Association

1992: Illustration as a way to survive (traveling exhibition), Courtrai, Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten

1992: DOCUMENTA IX in Kassel .

1993: Het Grote Archief , Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

1993: Incident at the Museum of Water Music , Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;

then 1994: incident in the museum or water music , Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt . Catalog de / en.

1993: NOMA or the Circle of Moscow Conceptualists , Kunsthalle Hamburg

1994: Operations room , (traveling exhibition), Nykytaiteen Museum, Helsinki

1995: The disconnected railway car , Deichtorhallen Hamburg

1996: On the roof , Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

1996: Ilya Kabakov - The Reading Room , Deichtorhallen Hamburg

1997: Sculpture.Projects : Do you look at the sky , Aaseewiese Münster

2000: Between the cinema and a hard palace , Tate Modern, London

2000: Palace of Projects , Public Art Fund, New York

2001: Palace of Projects , permanent exhibition in the salt store of the Zollverein coking plant , Essen

2001: Tacita Dean - Art Prize Aachen 2002 , Ludwig Forum Aachen

2003: 50th Venice Biennale

2004: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov - The incident in the museum and other installations , Hermitage, St. Petersburg

2005: 1st Moscow Biennale

2006: RUSSIA! Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao

2007: Under the snow , Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund

2007: Total Enlightenment: Moscow Conceptual Art 1960–1990 , Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

2010: Ilya Kabakov - ORBIS PICTUS - The children's book illustrator as a social figure , Kunsthaus Zug , Switzerland

2010: Ruhr Atoll , Baldeneysee, Essen

2012: A Return to Painting. A return to painting. 1960-2011 , Sprengel Museum Hannover

2012: together with Emilia Kabakow: The Haüppiest Man . Galleria continua , San Gimignano , Province of Siena , Tuscany , Italy

2013: Monumenta Grand Palais, Paris

2014: El Lissitzky - Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Utopia and Reality. , Kunsthaus Graz , Austria

2014: I'm starting to forget, Ilya Kabakov and Swiss Collections , Kunsthaus Zug , Switzerland

2019: In the Making: Ilya & Emilia Kabakov. From drawing to installation , Museum for Architectural Drawing , Berlin

Quote

"My dear! You lie in the grass, your head back, not a soul around you, you only hear the wind and look up at the open sky - at the blue up there, where the clouds are moving - that is perhaps the most beautiful thing you have in life have done and seen. "

- Text of the sculpture: “And you look up and read the words” in Münster .

Works

Ilya Kabakow, Jean-Hubert Martin, Claudia Jolles: Okno. Archipow looking out of the window = Das Fenster , Benteli, Bern 1985, ISBN 3-7165-0519-6 (German and English)

literature

Ilya Kabakov The arriving archive . On the occasion of the exhibition Ilya Kabakov - Das approached Archiv - The Arriving Archive, December 11, 1999 - January 30, 2000, translation by Ursula Keller , Galerie der Stadt Backnang . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 1999, ISBN 3-7757-9022-5 .
Total Enlightenment: Moscow Conceptual Art 1960–1990 . Edited by Boris Groys , Max Hollein , Manuel Fontan del Junco; Text by Ekaterina Bobrinskaja, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Boris Groys, Martina Weinhart, Dorothea Zwirner; Artist's texts by Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Monastyrski, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2008, ISBN 978-3-7757-2124-0 . (On the occasion of the exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt , June 21 - September 14, 2008, German and English.)
Ilya Kabakov, Boris Groys - The Art of Fleeing. Edition Akzente. Carl-Hanser-Verlag 1991. ISBN 978-3-446-20961-9 , translated from Russian by Gabriele Leupold

Movies

The strange city of the Kabakovs. (OT: La cité étrange des Kabakov. ) Documentary film, France, 2013, 26 min., Script and director: Heinz Peter Schwerfel, production: Schuch Productions, RMN-Grand Palais, arte France, first broadcast: May 18, 2014 on arte, Synopsis of arte.
"With flies and angels", documentary from 2009 by Niels Bolbrinker .

Web links

Commons : Ilya Kabakov - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

^ The cell builder in FAZ of January 3, 1994
↑ Museum page on the exhibition , accessed on May 3, 2014.

personal data
SURNAME	Kabakov, Ilya
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Kabakow, Ilya Jossifowitsch; Кабаков, Илья Иосифович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	soviet artist
DATE OF BIRTH	September 30, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH	Dnepropetrovsk , Soviet Union

[1] The cell builder in FAZ of January 3, 1994

[2] Museum page on the exhibition , accessed on May 3, 2014.