A major retrospective in Moscow brings Ilya and Emilia Kabakov back to the city of their artistic origins. What will the new Russia make of their darkly comic visions of the Soviet past?

MATTITUCK, N.Y.—The picturesque town of Mattituck, New York, on the North Fork of Long Island, is perhaps not where one would expect to find the studio and residence of two artists whose work often draws on the bleakest aspects of the Soviet past. But it is in this quaintly rural setting that Russia’s most famous living artists, Ilya Kabakov and his wife and creative collaborator, Emilia, have been living and working for more than a decade. In a modest two-story clapboard house bracketed by a verdant lawn in front and the waters of the Great Peconic Bay behind, the duo produce their “total installation” pieces, as well as paintings, drawings and models for public projects.

Over a simple afternoon meal in their spacious dining room, Ilya, who has a halo of white hair and an impish quality that belies his 74 years, and Emilia, a diminutive, energetic woman of 62, describe the activity that has been dominating their schedule: preparing for their multivenue retrospective in Moscow. Opening this month, the exhibition features a new group of paintings and installations, “The Gates,” at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and, at the brand-new Center for Contemporary Culture Moscow (CCCM), “An Alternative History of Art,” a series of paintings that will be shown in its entirety for the first time. Also to be displayed are three of their sprawling multipart installations from the 1990s: Red Wagon, 1991, at CCCM; Life of Flies, 1992, at the Contemporary Art Center Winzavod; and Toilet, 1992, at the Marat Guelman Gallery. Toilet, which debuted at Documenta 9, in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, may be their most famous work; it certainly made the pair synonymous with the representation of Soviet-era deprivations. The piece is a typical Soviet public restroom—a concrete structure with men’s and women’s areas—transformed into a communal living space complete with sagging cardboard boxes, children’s toys, a used ashtray, a table setting and dirty clothes.

The Moscow exhibition is something of a homecoming for the Kabakovs, who intend to be on hand for the opening. They’ve visited only sporadically over the years, even declining to travel to the city when they were in Russia in 2004 for a major show of their work at the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg. Both husband and wife were born in Dnipropetrovs’k, in Ukraine (then part of the USSR), but spent their formative years in Moscow, where they met briefly in the 1970s. It wasn’t until they were both living in New York, in the late 1980s, however, that they connected. They began collaborating in 1989 and married shortly thereafter.

Of the two, Emilia does most of the talking, perhaps because of her stronger command of English. She also seems to attend to many of the studio’s practical matters: After lunch, she dashes back and forth to her office computer, flustered over the complications of e-mailing some images to a magazine in London. She explains that she works with Ilya on the installations (while not formally trained in visual art, Emilia studied music and literature, subjects that appear frequently in the Kabakovs’ work) but that he alone creates the paintings and drawings. Still, it is difficult to get a sense of the precise division of labor in their partnership. When pressed about it, she and Ilya glance at each other conspiratorially. “That, we don’t talk about,” Emilia says, and Ilya adds, “It’s private. Big secret.”

What can be said with certainty is that in the 1950s, after strict academic training specializing in the graphic arts, Ilya started making what he calls the first artworks “for myself,” rather than for his official job as an illustrator of children’s books. These early creations were series of paintings and drawings, some in the style of the American Abstract Expressionists and others imitating Cézanne. By the mid-1970s, he had become a key member of the Moscow Conceptualists, a group of nonconformist artists that included the painters Erik Bulatov and Komar & Melamid. Their work critiqued and subverted Soviet imagery, often co-opting the techniques of the government-sanctioned school of Socialist Realism. Although the state tolerated the Conceptualists’ existence, they were not allowed to participate in official exhibitions and mostly showed their work in one another’s studios.