The Return of the Prodigal Forefather

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KABAKOV AND KABAKOV

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?

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A CONVERSATION WITH EMILIA KABAKOV

The artist discusses Russia's new exhibition space, its fresh crop of billionaire collectors, and the retrospective that will take them all in.

Ilya Kabakov Emilia Kabakov Erik Bulatov Kasimir Malevich The Block and the Booth Profile: Dasha Zhukova+Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst The Shape of Things Russian Art World Braces for Long Winter

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MOSCOW—Twenty years ago, Ilya Kabakov left the USSR after the first real and official indication of a loosening of the government-controlled art world — a Sotheby’s sale in Moscow, where his works commanded a nice sum of rubles. Tempted by the opportunities offered abroad, where a taste and market for Russian art were emerging (only to die off in the 1990s recession), the artist went to New York and joined Ronald Feldman’s stable. The decision proved wise: Russia’s ’90s, while giving birth to a sketch of democracy and private enterprise, were unstable and poor. In New York, on the other hand, Kabakov continued to be a productive artist, buoyed by his wife and collaborator since 1988, Emilia. In two decades in exile, Ilya and Emilia have created a number of memorable works, and as the market recovered from the ’90s recession, Ilya once again become a favorite of collectors. At a February 2008 auction at Phillips de Pury & Co., his Beetle (1982) became the highest selling work by a living Russian artist.

This September, the Kabakovs have returned to Russia, quite a different country from the USSR of 20 years ago, with a large multivenue retrospective with staggered openings. It’s a giant event, and one for which the art world here has long held its breath. On September 15, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts opened the show with a series of paintings called “Gates. The Artist’s Last Works” and an installation of the same name — the only work made specifically for the retrospective. The paintings, which show a basic gate-like structure positioned on the horizon, have a Symbolist feel; the installation is an expensive-looking double door on a pedestal.

The next day saw what is widely considered the most important event of Kabakov’s visit. The Center for Contemporary Culture Moscow, a new space more informally known as the “Garage” and run by oligarch Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend Daria Zhukova, had its official opening, which featured two installations, the large-scale Alternative History of Art (1997) and the smaller Red Wagon (1991). The former, almost a retrospective within a retrospective, introduces work by three fictional artists: Charles Rosenthal, “Ilya Kabakov,” and Igor Spivak. They are said to have worked in the 1930s, ’70s, and ’90s respectively, though their paintings and objects vary little – each is an amalgam of Socialist Realism and Malevich’s architectons, an attempt to make peace between the good Russian art (avant-garde) and the ugly (the official art of the Stalin era). These works are put in a faux museum with dimmed light.

And to top things off, on September 17, another privately owned contemporary art center, the Winzavod, debuted its selection of Kabakovs. Two large-scale installations, Life of Flies and WC (both 1992), are on view at the center’s White Hall, and a third, Tennis Game (1995) is at the nearby Marat Guelman Gallery, which rents space at Winzavod. Life of Flies is, again, a faux museum, in which the titular insect is simultaneously seen as the lowest form of life in a communal kitchen of the Soviet times and a key to global economy and politics. WC is quite another matter. In a free-standing structure instantly recognizable to many a Russian as a public toilet at a railroad station, Kabakov installs the accessories of the everyman’s private life — chairs, beds, children’s toys, and the like. The urinals are also present. A selection of archive photos of the artist by his longtime friend Yuri Rost accompanies the White Hall exhibition.

The budget for the retrospective was reported to be somewhere close to $3 million (which is quite large, by Russian standards), a number the organizers have neither confirmed nor denied. Sources say that Art Media Group, an emerging media corporation that plans to issue a Russian version of Art+Auction magazine, provided $300,000 for the segment at the CCCM.

Kabakov has long been an important, if remote, fixture of the local art world. Among the nonconformist artists who left the country in the 1970s and ’80s, he was considered the most elusive and the most reluctant to return. While most of his contemporaries from the Soviet underground now split time between Russia and the West, he lives exclusively in New York and doesn’t have an apartment or studio in Moscow. In his absence, his works and quotes have become the stuff of legend: Everyone knew, for example, that he had vowed never to return to his motherland, but nobody could prove it. Everyone also knew that sometime in the 1990s Kabakov was selected as one of the ten greatest living artists by a U.S.-based arts publication; but nearly nobody knew the name of the publication (it was ARTNews) — or the Kabakovs’ exact status in the West.