Kabakov and Kabakov

Photo by Kevin Cooley

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in their studio, with a work from their new series “The Gates”

Photo by Kevin Cooley

A recent painting by Ilya, "Broken Glass #1" (2005)

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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.

Kabakov’s focus during those years was his albums, specifically, a series that relates, through images and text, the stories of 10 absurdist figures, such as “the Flying Komarov,” a man who looks through his window to see a whirlwind of citizens flying in the skies above Moscow. By the early 1980s, Kabakov had begun conceiving environments in which such fictional personages might reside, but it was not until he left the repressive confines of Moscow for the more laissez-faire international stage that he was able to show these pieces in museums and galleries.

Like Kabakov’s albums, the installations—which incorporate paintings, many of them by the artist himself, as well as pastiches of Soviet graphic art, explanatory texts and everyday objects—have a literary quality that evokes the Russian novel more than Western conceptual art. The first of these works that he showed, in 1988, was the groundbreaking “10 Characters,” for which he transformed New York’s Ronald Feldman Gallery into a communal apartment subdivided into living areas for 10 fictional personages similar to those developed in his graphic albums. The most famous of his imaginary tenants is “the man who flew into space from his apartment,” whose room is dominated by a hammocklike contraption that apparently allowed him to catapult himself out of his cramped quarters. Many critics interpreted it as a potent metaphor for the fantasy of escaping the Soviet regime.

Another of the apartment’s inmates is the “man who never threw anything away,” an allusion to Kabakov himself. While living in Moscow, he created pieces from refuse he’d accumulated in his studio, the now-legendary space at 6/1 Sretensky Boulevard that he occupied for some 20 years, starting in 1967. In her monograph on the Kabakovs, the art critic Amei Wallach describes it as “an artist’s garret out of La bohème,” with “eaves so sloping it was often necessary to bend.”

The couple’s Mattituck studio, a ground-floor space they added to the house, is well ordered and rubbish free. Awash in pale light that floods through north-facing windows, it is “not so big, but big enough for my biggest paintings,” says Ilya. On one wall hangs a large canvas in progress, while on a nearby tabletop sits a wooden model about the size of a dollhouse. Emilia says that this simple chapel-like structure is meant to hold a group of paintings—a glance inside reveals miniature canvases pasted to the walls—and that they hope to build it someday.

Across the lawn from the studio, a separate structure that serves as a kind of minimuseum houses numerous such models for projects, both realized and unrealized. The replicas are all presented on wooden bases and enclosed in Plexiglas cases. Walking along the narrow aisles between the models, Emilia explains in detail the project each represents. One replica is for The Ship of Siwa, 2006, a sailboat stitched together from drawings made by children in Siwa, Egypt. Another is for Red Wagon, the full-size version of which is in the Moscow retrospective, a walk-in metaphor for three phases of Russian art history: Visitors climb a Constructivist staircase to a drably painted Soviet-era train car inside which idealized Socialist Realist landscapes are displayed to the accompaniment of nationalistic music. They exit from the train into an area scattered with garbage that represents unofficial art from the 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The Kabakovs have shifted in their recent work to more general utopian themes and say they intend to balance pieces that, like Red Wagon, explicitly evoke the Soviet past with others that address broader issues. “When people think ‘Kabakov,’ they think ‘toilet,’ or ‘communal apartment,’ ” says Emilia. “They think everything is about Soviet Russia. But it’s not. It’s also about culture, about philosophy, about literature, about the history of art.”

Emblematic of the last concern is the ongoing series “An Alternative History of Art,” begun in 1997. The paintings, actually done by Ilya, are attributed to fictional artists representing three generations: Charles Rosenthal, who is supposed to have died in 1933, the year of his creator’s birth; Ilya Kabakov, the artist’s alter ego; and Igor Spivak, whose paintings are dated to the 1990s. In the studio, Emilia discourses on a few of the canvases from the series. One is a Rosenthal, depicting a naturalistically rendered scene of young people reading, on which are superimposed abstract, Malevich-like white squares, the whole representing an attempt to reconcile tradition with the avant-garde. She also points to a painting by Spivak, whose palette of whites and chalky reds, she explains, betrays his nostalgia for Soviet times. He paints “with rose-colored glasses on,” she says.

The attribution of the works to others may relate to Ilya’s experience in the old Russia of having to distance himself from his production as an unofficial artist. These days he is more interested in creating under his own name. Among the pieces in his studio are a few from the “Under the Snow” series, 2004–06, in which scenes of everyday life and people’s faces are painted on white fields so that the viewer seems to peer at them through openings in a blanket of snow. Some of these were on view at Art Basel last June at the booth of the Paris and Salzburg dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, and others can be seen through February 2009 at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, in Spain. Ropac, who has represented the Kabakovs since 1995—they are represented in New York by the Sean Kelly Gallery and also work with the Deweer Art Gallery, in Otegem, Belgium, and Sprovieri Progetti, in London—is currently featuring two newer series, “The Canon” and “Broken Glass,” at his Salzburg branch through September 27. “[Ilya] has dived back into painting with renewed vigor,” says Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, a director of the Ropac gallery in Paris. “He’s revealing himself without the theatrical embellishments of the personages. He has become comfortable enough to do that.”

The 12 paintings in the “Gates” series are moody depictions in varying light of gates that resemble the Golden Gate of Kiev, an 11th-century stone archway providing entrée into the Ukrainian capital. Speaking perhaps with an ironic awareness that he himself is a late-career artist, Ilya explains that the pictures are meant to appear to be “the final work of an artist—as in, you read the biography and you get to the last work, and it is very pompous, pessimistic, philosophical, important.”

The conversation turns to the Soviet era. “To show anything connected to the past right now is difficult—it is either too close or too far away,” says Emilia. “Today many Russians live the same kind of life they did then, in the same crowded apartments, with the same difficulties. On the other hand, for people who have moved up and now live a different kind of life, there is a nostalgia for Soviet times.” Ilya nods.

The Kabakovs are thinking of the past as they prepare to show in Moscow some of their most famous works, created and originally displayed in the West and all but unknown to a Russian audience. Things are different in today’s Moscow, which has become not just an artistic center but a market hub. The Kabakovs remark on such changes only obliquely, referring to the extreme car traffic as evidence of the city’s heightened energy. What of the fact that many Russian artists are actually able to sell their creations there? The market, Ilya posits, “is the new ideology,” and the work of today’s underground artists does not cater to it. The indirectness of his responses may spring from the strangeness of going back to a place where he once had to exhibit clandestinely and where now cutting-edge contemporary art is made, shown and sold openly. When asked about his own next project, Ilya pauses and shrugs. “That’s a tough question, because every work is spontaneous,” he muses. “I go into the shower, and I get an idea. I never know what the next one will be.” 

"Kabakov and Kabakov" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.