Pioneering artist Ilya Kabakov has died aged 89

Ilya Kabakov, the artist known for his philosophical and literary depictions of life in the Soviet Union and his utopian visions expressing a desire to break free from totalitarianism, died at the age of 89 near New York on Saturday May 27.

An announcement sent on behalf of his widow and longtime collaborator Emilia Kabakov did not name a cause of death.

Kabakov was born in 1933 to Iosif Bensionovich Kabakov and Bertha Judelevna Solodukhina in what was then called Dnepropetrovsk, now Dnipro, Ukraine. His early years were marked by the Second World War, which determined his artistic trajectory. He was sent with his mother for safety to Samarkand, Ukraine, where he entered the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

After the war, he enrolled at the Surikov State Art Institute in Moscow, where he studied graphic design and book illustration, launching his official career as the illustrator of hundreds of children’s books. . He was simultaneously deeply engrossed in creating unofficial art. His studio in central Moscow became the heart of the Sretensky Art Group, which included artists Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev. It gave rise to the artistic movement known as Moscow Conceptualism and had an international impact despite being part of a closed society.

He left the USSR in 1987 and began working with Emilia Kanevsky, whom he was related to and had known all his life. They married in 1992. After living in Manhattan, they created an artistic oasis on Long Island, where they live and work.

The Kabakovs’ work has been exhibited in major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Center Pompidou in Paris. It was embraced but never fully understood in post-Soviet Russia by both state institutions and private collectors, exhibited at the Hermitage Museum and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, one of Kabakov’s drawings of a ship in the 1980s became a meme symbolizing Ukrainian resistance.

Kabakov is best known for his “total installations,” a genre that extracted his biography and served in effect as the autobiography of every “little man” living under state oppression while reaching for the stars. The man who flew into space from his apartment, created in his Moscow studio in 1985 and first shown at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York in 1988, depicts a devastated room from a Soviet communal apartment, complete with all the paraphernalia of life under communism, including political posters. The man who lived there left, through a huge hole in the ceiling.

In his artist’s commentary on the work, actually his own anticipated obituary, kabakov wrote of his constant desire to flee, “to run without looking back” when you least expect it, “to jump out of the window that is always closed, out of the door that is probably locked”: “

“For a long time, since my earliest childhood, I have been fed up, bored, with its exhausting ‘everyday’, its circular movement day after day, even the fact that it ‘is’, and no matter that it either pleasant, joyful, interesting or boring, excruciating. I’m just sick of being, and I remember life as a miserable necessity. Running away from life? It never occurred to me. After all, the real “departure” will most likely happen on its own, in its time, and will not depend on our desire.”