Ilya Kabakov: paintings and their description. Artist Kabakov Ilya Iosifovich

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

It's good to be an art critic in the era of the Internet and abstract nicknames - no one will know the real name, you can not restrain yourself, because everything is so clear and understandable - they are all grabbers and hacks! Here, for example, is the conceptualist Ilya Kabakov. Paintings, graphics, installations - some things are unlike anything in the world, but cost millions - everything is clear!

But some connoisseurs should calm their breaking voice, but it's better to get to the exhibition of this master. And if you look with truly open eyes, you can see an amazing, inexhaustible world, sometimes full of humor and irony, sometimes ringing with pain for the people who lived and still live in this incomprehensible country…

14 years of study

But first there was a long study of the profession. Kabakov Ilya Iosifovich was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk, in the family of a locksmith and an accountant. During the war, she and her mother ended up in Samarkand, where the Repin Institute was evacuated from Leningrad. Ilya began to study at the children's art school at this institute. After the war, Kabakov was transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School, from which he graduated in 1951 and enteredto the best art university in the country - the Surikov Institute, to the graphic department. He chose to specialize in the art of the book with Professor Dekhterev.

In today's memoirs of the master, full of self-irony and hoaxes, one can find his frivolous attitude to his activities in the design of children's books, which he took up after graduating from the institute in 1957. He calls them only a way of obtaining funds for subsistence, to which he devoted a small part of his time and effort. Printed products for children were especially imbued with ideological clichés and dogmas, and supposedly, therefore, it was impossible to make something interesting in them.

This seems to be a slight slyness: the quality of books published by the publishing house "Children's Literature", magazines "Murzilka", "Funny Pictures" is remembered by many with delight, not only because of age nostalgia. Ilya Kabakov is an artist who created illustrations for Marshak's poems, fairy tales by Charles Perrault, stories about Peter Pan. In these apparently non-academic works, freedom, novelty and fantasy are clearly visible. The design of scientific and educational children's books is very interesting: "Wonders from Wood" (1960), "Clay and Hands" (1963), "The Ocean Begins with a Drop" (1966) by E. Mara, "The Tale of Gas" by E. Permyak (1960), "Cunning Point" (1966).

Workshop under the roof of "Russia"

From the end of the 60s, a society of nonconformist artists called "Sretensky Boulevard" was formed in Moscow. It included Ilya Kabakov. The paintings of the artists of this friendly association were very different from the officially approvedpainting.

The opportunity to get together appeared largely thanks to Kabakov. Work for publishing houses brought good money, and the artist got his own workshop. He calls it a mystical story, how he found a room under the roof of the former Rossiya apartment building on Sretensky Boulevard and agreed with the authorities to equip the studio there.

The works of Ilya Kabakov, Hulot Sooster, Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vasilyev and others were exhibited at unofficial exhibitions in Moscow and abroad, embodying the alternative art of the USSR during the thaw. But the harsh reaction to abstract art from the country's main "art critics" led to the triumph of socialist realism alone.

Before the appearance of our own studio, “works for myself” consisted of graphic sheets in the style of abstract expressionism and small format albums. Later, paintings of a larger format began to appear: "Head with a ball" (1965), "Pipe, cane, ball and fly" (1966), "Assault rifle and chicken" (1966).

Text as a pictorial medium

Ilya Kabakov, whose paintings began to contain more and more philosophical overtones, became one of the leaders of conceptualists. A series of "white" paintings of a huge size - "Berdyansk Sleeps" (1970), "A Man and Small House" (1970) - evoked thoughts about the conditions for the perception of new painting, about the interaction between the viewer and the artist. The movement in this direction is served by the artist's experiments with the introduction of text into the picture space. The first such works - "Where are they?" (1970), "All About Him" (1970),"Answers of the experimental group" (1970) - are various items from the real life of Moscow communal apartments with text comments, often pseudo-significant parodies of official instructions or announcements.

The text is also used later by Ilya Kabakov. "Luxury Room" (1981) - a picture that is a view of a hotel room with an advertisement for a trip to the Black Sea resorts superimposed on the image.

The albums invented by Kabakov, which became the forerunner of installations, are also conceptual works. Such albums - a fusion of sculpture, illustration, literature, theater - are built around a single theme or character's experience, expressed through visual and textual means. Watching significant or meaningless events stack on top of each other is mesmerizing. It impresses either with completeness or openness in any direction of time and space.

Ilya Kabakov is a graphic artist, illustrator, type designer. In such albums, the essence of his activities is most accurately traced. The most famous album is Ten Characters (1970-74).

War and peace of communal apartments

The social conditions of the Soviet era are the main object of research for Kabakov's work. The oppressive influence of the dominance of one ideology found expression in works such as Checked! (1981) and "Supermarket" (1981). The wars of neighbors in communal apartments for air and additional space are the theme of Zhekov's compositions "Taking Out the Garbage" (1980), "Sunday Evening" (1980). ATIn the "Kitchen Series" of the same period, familiar kitchen utensils are endowed with a certain high artistic value, cultural meaning, often separated from functionality.

Ordinary household waste is filled with such meaning in the subsequent installation “The Man Who Never Threw Away” (1985). In it, one can also see global discussions about the meaning of human activity, about the habit of recklessly storing what is necessary and unnecessary, or, conversely, revising history with the fitting of the past to the needs of modern politics.

Total installations

In 1987, Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov emigrated to the West. Here he gets the opportunity to access large exhibition spaces. "Total installations" - this is how Ilya Kabakov calls paintings and objects that occupy large spaces and are united by a common global design.

The most famous was the installation “A Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment”, which is largely symbolic for the fate of the artist himself. In the center of a small room with walls pasted over with Soviet posters, something resembling a slingshot is fixed. The break in the ceiling, the comments and the description of the room as the scene of the incident - everything proves the reality of an extraordinary event: a certain inventor with the help of an ingenious catapult, breaking through the ceiling with his body, went into near-Earth space - the body was not found …

To see in such an object only banter and mockery of the formation is wrong. Just as in the installation "Toilet" (1992), to find only a spiteful analogypublic toilets as the usual conditions of life in the whole country. This art object struck especially the Western viewer, who considers the privacy of living space a natural need of a normal person.

Red Wagon (1991), Bridge (1991), Life of Flies (1992), We Live Here (1995) are total installations that brought fame to Kabakov. They are exhibited in museums in the USA and Europe, and combined into exhibitions such as "The Palace of Projects" (1998, London) and "50 Installations" (2000, Bern) represent Kabakov's work as a phenomenon of world culture.

Wife and collaborator

Kabakov loves to color life with hoaxes. Artists such as Charles Rosenthal, Igor Spivak, and Stepan Koshelev were prone to such inventions. Kabakov entered into creative cooperation with them, he even wrote articles about them in the style of boring art critics.

Since 1989, the artist has found a real co-author - Emilia Lekah. She becomes his wife and takes care of many organizational and financial issues, leaving the master more time for creativity. And there are more and more such questions, because interest in Kabakov's work is growing. An example of this is the Phillips de Pury & Company auction. In 2007, the lot “Ilya Kabakov. "Suite". The painting was bought for 2 million pounds, and Kabakov becomes the most expensive contemporary Russian painter.

In 2008, this is confirmed by regular auctions at the same auction. Another lot - "Ilya Kabakov, "Beetle" (1982)", and another record - 2.93 million£.

The ability to be surprised

Counting dollars and pounds is necessary - this is the current world. But I want this banal idea to survive in him, that happiness is not in money. It is in the existence of such artists, in their work and talent. Humanity will be made up of people, not animals, as long as it is able to marvel at and enjoy art.