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

It’s good to be an art critic in the era of the Internet and abstract nicknames - no one will know a real name, you can’t restrain yourself, because everything is so clear and understandable - they are all jerkers and hacks! Here, for example, the conceptualist Ilya Kabakov. Paintings, graphics, installations - some things are not like anything in the world, but are worth 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 a wonderful, inexhaustible world, then full of humor and irony, then ringing pain for the people who lived and live in this incomprehensible country ...

14 years of study

But at 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 accountant. During the war, he and his mother ended up in Samarkand, where the Repin Institute was evacuated from Leningrad. In a children's art school at this institute, Ilya began to study. After the war, Kabakov was transferred to the Moscow secondary art school, which he graduated in 1951 and entered the country's best art university - the Surikov Institute, in the graphic department. He chose a specialization in the art of books from Professor Dekhterev.

In today's master’s memoirs, full of self-irony and hoaxes, one can find his frivolous attitude to his classes in the design of children's books, which he took up after graduating in 1957. He calls them only a means of obtaining food for which he devoted a small part of his time and effort. Printed materials for children were especially permeated with ideological cliches and dogmas, and supposedly therefore it was impossible to do something interesting in it.

This seems like a slight cunning: the quality of books by the publishing house Children's Literature, magazines Murzilka, and Funny Pictures is remembered with enthusiasm by many not only because of age-related nostalgia. Ilya Kabakov is an artist who created illustrations for Marshak’s poems, tales of Charles Perrault, and stories about Peter Pan. In these clearly non-academic works, freedom, novelty and fantasy are clearly visible. The design of children's scientific and educational books is very interesting: “Miracles from a Tree” (1960), “Clay and Hands” (1963), “The Ocean Starts with a Drop” (1966) E. Mara, “The Tale of Gas” by E. Permyak (1960 ), "The Tricky Point" (1966).

Workshop under the roof of "Russia"

Since the late 60s, a society of nonconformist artists called "Sretensky Boulevard" was formed in Moscow. Ilya Kabakov also entered it. The paintings of the artists of this friendly association were very different from the officially approved painting.

The opportunity to get together appeared largely thanks to Kabakov. The work for the publishers brought good money, and the artist had his own workshop. He calls a mystical story how he found a room under the roof of the former apartment building "Russia" on Sretensky Boulevard and agreed with the authorities on the equipment of the studio there.

The works of Ilya Kabakov, Yulo Sooster, Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vasiliev and others were exhibited at unofficial exhibitions in Moscow and abroad, personifying the alternative art of the USSR during the thaw. But the rude reaction to abstract art by the main "art critics" of the country led to the triumph of socialist realism alone.

Before the advent of their own studio, “work for themselves” 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), “Tube, cane, ball and fly” (1966), “Machine gun and chicken” (1966).

Text as a painting tool

Ilya Kabakov, whose paintings began to contain an increasingly philosophical implication, became one of the leaders of conceptualists. A series of "white" paintings of enormous size - "Berdyansk sleeps" (1970), "A Man and Small House" (1970) - evoked thoughts about the conditions of perception of a new painting, about the interaction of the viewer and the artist. The movement in this direction is the artist’s experiments with the introduction of the text of the picture into space. The first such work - “Where are they?” (1970), “Everything about him” (1970), “Answers of the experimental group” (1970) - are various objects from the real life of Moscow communal apartments with text comments, often pseudo-significant parodies of official instructions or announcements.

The text is used later by Ilya Kabakov. “Suite” (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 conceptual works are also the albums invented by Kabakov, which became the forerunner of the installations. Such albums - an alloy of sculpture, illustration, literature, theater - are built around one theme or experience of the character, expressed by visual and textual means. Watching the stringing of significant or meaningless events on each other is fascinating. It impresses with either completeness or openness in any direction of time and space.

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

War and Peace Communal

The social conditions of the Soviet era are the main object of research for the work of Kabakov. The oppressive influence of the dominance of one ideology found expression in such works as “Verified!” (1981) and Supermarket (1981). The wars of neighbors in communal apartments over air and additional space are the theme of the “Zhekovsky” compositions “Garbage removal” (1980), “Sunday evening” (1980). In the “Kitchen Series” of the same period, familiar kitchen utensils are endowed with a certain high artistic value, cultural meaning, often separated from functionality.

This meaning is also filled with ordinary household garbage in the subsequent installation “The Man Who Never Threw Out Anything” (1985). In it one can see global discussions about the meaning of human activity, about the habit of recklessly storing the necessary and the unnecessary, or, conversely, revising history with the fit 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 what Ilya Kabakov calls paintings and objects that occupy large spaces and are united by a common global concept.

The most famous was the installation "A man who flew into space from his apartment", largely symbolic for the fate of the artist himself. In the center of a small room with walls covered with Soviet posters, something like a slingshot is fortified. A break in the ceiling, comments and a description of the room as the scene of the incident - everything proves the reality of an extraordinary event: a certain inventor, using a cunning catapult, breaking through the ceiling with his body, went into near-Earth space - they didn’t find the body ...

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 the vicious analogy of a public toilet as usual living conditions in the whole country. This art object especially impressed the Western audience, who considered the privacy of living space a natural need of a normal person.

“Red Carriage” (1991), “Bridge” (1991), “Life of Flies” (1992), “We Live Here” (1995) - total installations that brought Kabakov fame. They are exhibited in museums in the USA and Europe, and combined in 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 co-author

Kabakov loves to colorize life with hoaxes. Periodically appearing artists Charles Rosenthal, Igor Spivak, Stepan Koshelev were inclined to such fictions. Kabakov entered into creative cooperation with them; he even wrote articles about them in the style of boring art historians.

Since 1989, the artist finds 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 bidding at the same auction. The next lot is Ilya Kabakov, The Beetle (1982), and the next record is £ 2.93 million.

Ability to be surprised

Counting dollars and pounds is necessary - this is the current world. But I want this banal little 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 consist of people, not animals, as long as it is able to surprise and enjoy art.