Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov (; ; September 30, 1933 – May 27, 2023) was an American and Soviet conceptual artist, born in Dnipropetrovsk in what was then the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union, now Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. After emigrating to the United States he lived and worked on Long Island.
Early life
Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933, in Dnipropetrovsk. His mother, accountant Bertha Judelevna Solodukhina, and his father, locksmith Iosif Bentcionovitch Kabakov, were Jewish. Ilya was evacuated during World War II to Samarkand with his parents. There he started attending the school of the Leningrad Academy of Art. His classmates included the painter Mikhail Turovsky. At 18, he moved to Moscow to attend the Surikov Art Institute, where he graduated with a specialty in graphic design and book illustration.
Personal life and death
Kabakov emigrated to Austria in 1987, then the United States in 1988, following the gradual exhibition of his works in the West. A year after arriving in New York, he met curator and dealer Emilia Kanevsky, who was also his niece; they married in 1992. For three decades, the couple collaborated on numerous exhibitions, including Documenta in 1992, the Venice Biennale in 1993, the Whitney Biennial in 1997, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in 2004, and the Tate Modern and the Hirshhorn in 2017. He had one daughter and four grandchildren.
National Museum of Norway (Norway) has "Søppelmannen" ['the garbage man'] on permanent display.
Books
- Kabakov, Ilya. 5 Albums, Helsinki: The Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo. Helsinki: ARTPRINT, 1994.
- Kabakov, Ilya. The Communal Kitchen, Paris: Musee Maillol, 1994.
- Kabakov, Ilya. 10 Characters, New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1988.
- Kabakov, Ilya. Ilya Kabakov on Ulo Sooster's Paintings: Subjective Notes, Tallinn: "Kunst" publishing house, 1996.
- Kabakov, Ilya and Vladimir Tarasov. Red Pavilion, Venice Biennale Venice: Venice Biennale, 1993.
- Kabakov, Ilya. Life of Flies, Koln: Edition Cantz, 1992.
- Kabakov et al. Ilya Kabakov: Public Projects or the Spirit of a Place, Milan: Charta, 2001, .
- Kabakov, Ilya; Osaka, Eriko ed. Life and Creativity of Charles Rosenthal (1898–1933), Contemporary Art Center: Art Tower Mito, Japan, 1999, 2 volumes.
Further reading
- Wallach, Amei. Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, New York: Harry Abrams, 1996.
- Meyer, Werner, ed. Ilya Kabakov: A Universal System for Depicting Everything Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002.
- Groys, Boris, David A. Ross, Iwona Blaznick. Ilya Kabakov, London: Phaidon, 1998.
- Jackson, Matthew Jesse. The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
See also
- List of Russian artists
- Moscow Conceptualism
- Irina Nakhova