ILYA KABAKOV (Dniepropetrosk, Ukraine, 1933).

ILYA KABAKOV (Dniepropetrosk, Ukraine, 1933). "This I saw on January 9 in the morning", 1987. Ink and colored pencils on paper. Signed and dated in the lower right corner. With stamp on the back of the Fernando Durán Gallery. Size: 39 x 25 cm; 51 x 36 cm (frame). A Russian-American conceptual artist, Ilya Kavakov moved to Moscow in the 1950s, where he worked until the late 1980s. Since then, he has lived and worked in Long Island, USA. Over the course of his more than forty-year career, Kabakov has produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations and theoretical texts. In recent years, he has created installations that evoke the visual culture of the Soviet Union, although this subject has never been the exclusive focus of his work. Unlike some underground Soviet artists, Kabakov joined the Union of Soviet Artists in 1959, and became a full member in 1962. In his work he attempts to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union, which, according to him, was the first modern society to disappear. Instead of describing the Soviet Union as a failed socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov describes it as a utopian project among many others, including capitalism. By reexamining historical narratives and perspectives, Kabakov conveys the message that every project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will to power. Mimicking the official style of posters, his works are accompanied by words that establish relationships between the apparent subject and the text. He is currently represented in the Kniga collection in Paris, in the collections of the Zimmerli Art Museum, the Pompidou Center (Beaubourg), the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Hermitage, the Tretjakov Gallery (Moscow), the Museum of Contemporary Art Norway, and museums in Columbus, Ohio, Frankfurt, Cologne, etc. In 2017, the Tate Modern in London exhibited Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. mounted an exhibition Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects.