September 30: Birthday of Ilya Kabakov, an artist of the Soviet communal apartment
Born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk Ilya Kabakov — conceptual artist, author of “total installations” about everyday life in Soviet communal apartments.
Not everyone will be taken into the future
Childhood and studies
His father was a mechanic, his mother an accountant. He spent the Great Patriotic War evacuated to the North Caucasus and Samarkand.
In 1957, he graduated from the graphics department of the Surikov Institute in Moscow. While still a student, he began illustrating books for the Detgiz publishing house and the magazines Malysh, Murzilka, and Vesyolye Kartinki.
I knew how to imitate a children's illustration so I could get paid for it. In Soviet times, it didn't matter whether I believed it or copied someone else's bunnies.
Basement on Taganka and attic on Sretensky
Having met underground artists, he worked with them in a basement studio on Taganka Street. There, he created his first wall-mounted paintings and prototypes of future installations—"Boy" (a parody of Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man") and "Automaton and Chickens" (an allegory of censorship).
In part, "The Machine Gun and the Chickens" also recalls the situation of underground artists: don't stick your neck out or you'll get killed.
He exhibited his works in the USSR and abroad, including at dissident exhibitions, but did not consider himself a dissident.
In 1967, he moved to a studio in the attic of a building on Sretensky Boulevard, which became one of the main centers of Moscow’s artistic life.
There he created the painting-object "Responses of the Experimental Group"—the first work in the history of Moscow Conceptualism. Instead of images, he used fragments of everyday texts with the speakers' captions.
The central image of his other works is the fly, a symbol of the insignificance, absurdity, and monotony of Soviet life.
Ilya Kabakov and the communal apartment
Since the late 1970s, he has turned to the theme of Soviet communal apartments, immersing the viewer in the space where the voices of their inhabitants "sound."
Instead of canvas, I used plywood—a nod to the housing office's signboards and tables. On them, I placed notes that communal apartment residents addressed to each other. For example, a trash can removal schedule, scheduled six years in advance.
For me, the communal apartment turned out to be the same central plot that Gorky’s flophouse in the play “The Lower Depths” was.
In 1982, he created one of his most famous "total installations," "The Man Who Flew into Space." A catapult is installed in the center of a cluttered room with a hole in the ceiling—a symbol of escape from a communal apartment.
Other installations include “Trash Box” (an allegory of bureaucracy in the USSR) and “16 Ropes” (with household trash hung on them, along with paper cards, remarks, and dialogues between residents).
Emigration and worldwide recognition
In 1989, he left the USSR. He lived in Germany and the United States. He created installations with his third wife and second cousin. Emilia Kabakova (Lekakh).
Among them were "Toilet" (a cozy Soviet living room complete with a public restroom), "Red Carriage" (the history of the USSR from its inception to its demise), and "Ten Characters" (a full-scale model of a communal apartment). Viewers walked through the hallway and rooms, discovering traces of the lives of their inhabitants—the subjects of his works "The Man Who Flew into a Painting," "The Short Man," "The Composer," "The Collector," "The Man Saving Nikolai Viktorovich," "The Garbage Man," and "The Man Collecting Others' Opinions."
Each of them invents their own way of escaping or at least ignoring the surrounding world: collecting postcards, returning to their past, looking through their trash, flying inside a picture they painted themselves, or, finally, a fantastic, absolutely incredible way to escape into space by breaking through the ceiling of their own room.
In 2000, ArtNews magazine included him in its list of the 10 greatest living artists.
In the 2000s, his works “Beetle” and “Luxury Room” became the most expensive works of contemporary Russian art ever sold.
Return to Russia and the Tretyakov Gallery Museum
Since the 2000s, his works have been exhibited in Russia, including at the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery. In 2010, he signed a letter to the Russian president in support of the curators of the "Forbidden Art" exhibition.
In 2018, he donated his workshop to the Tretyakov Gallery, where the Kabakov Museum is planned to open at the end of 2026.
The museum is a wonderful example of how one can remain eternal even after losing its physical substance.
Died in 2023 in New York, at 89.