Death of the artist Ilya Iossifovich Kabakov, when the USSR was a harsh concept

Brief press release from the Center Pompidou, on this sunny Pentecost Sunday, to announce the death, at the age of 89, of Ilya Iossifovich Kabakov, the father of Russian conceptual art and the totemic figure of the arts, Saturday May 27. This leading man of the Russian scene was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnipropetrovsk, in what would become the Ukraine of the Soviet Union. He first lived and worked in Moscow, from the 1950s to the 1980s, before emigrating to the United States and settling, with his studio, on Long Island where he remained far from the world. “It is with great emotion that we learn today of the disappearance of Ilya Iossifovich Kabakov, an essential artist for more than 70 years. In 1995, his installation "This is where we live" occupied the entire Forum of the Center Pompidou for several months. We will dedicate an exhibition to him in 2024”, underlined the Parisian museum.

As part of Monumenta, the Strange City by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, was presented at the Grand Palais from May 10 to June 22, 2014. A disconcerting and poetic installation, orchestrated under the joint curatorship of Olga Sviblova, director of the Multimedia Art Museum (MAMM) of Moscow and pillar of contemporary art from Moscow to Venice, and Jean-Hubert Martin who was director of the National Museum of Modern Art. Through a game of impossible architectures and lost angels, flights like Icarus and falls, melancholy drawings, theoretical texts and objects that have lost their function, Ilya Kabakov and his wife Emilia staged their culture, the history of their country at the harshest of censorship, the frenzied imagination that allows them to escape everything. The conquest of space reduced to the individual.

Playing with metaphors and humor marked by a sense of the absurd, Kabakov's art told of everyday life in the Soviet Union, from the most ethereal to the most trivial, from the music of the skies to the communal latrines and its flies, creating a kind of illustrated cemetery of a utopian society which wanted to be modern, egalitarian, new, and which ended up disappearing into a straitjacket. More than an epitaph of the USSR, his work underlined the always possible drift of a utopia towards disaster, the germ of destruction being part of any system which becomes unique and therefore authoritarian.

Following him, the writer Svetlana Alexievitch, born in 1948 in Stanislav in Soviet Ukraine, recounted in 2013, in The end of the red man or the time of disenchantment, the implosion of the USSR, after 70 years of Marxism-Leninism and millions of deaths. What remains of Homo sovieticus? Armed with a tape recorder and a pen, driven by attentiveness and a critical spirit, Svetlana Alexievitch met survivors who lived the little story of a great utopia. Their intertwined stories, without apparent logic or precise presentation of the witnesses, redraw the dream and the tragedy that was the Soviet Union. And the strange melancholy she left. This won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.

Born of Jewish parents - his mother Bertha Judelevna Solodukhina, was an accountant, his father, Iosif Bentcionovitch Kabakov, a locksmith - Ilya Kabakov had a unique way of diverting the object from its use to give it a symbolic value, letting things speak for themselves. him (The Shower series, 1965, and his eternally waterless showers). He was evacuated during the Second World War to Samarkand, like the Leningrad Academy of Art, while his father went to the front. From 1945 to 1951, he returned to Moscow to continue his art studies, first focusing on drawing and illustration.

In the 1960s, he joined what would become the Sretensky Boulevard Group, alongside Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vasiliev and Vladimir Borisovich Yankilevsky. To survive the persecutions of this legendary Moscow underground group, some of whose members were imprisoned or exiled, Kabakov has often said that he bowed to the rules of the system on the surface. In his Russian Series, his drawings move significant details out of the center, opting for detour and allusion. It took a more conceptual turn from the 1970s. Under the influence of structuralists from the West who showed sympathy for Soviet ideology, dissident artists and intellectuals posed as almost neutral observers of the systems that clashed, Marxism against capitalism.

"Ilya Kabakov, who describes himself as a Soviet artist, deviates from the socialist realist course imposed on the senses, recreating in his total installations the psychological effects of an incessant struggle with ideology, and becomes a narrator of deviations and degeneracy it may have engendered in its subjects. It synthesizes the repercussions of this aspiration to the ideal on Homo Sovieticus through the representation of community apartments, the kommunalki”, says Alice Cazaux in Ilya Kabakov, or the story of community lives (2013). The Maillol Museum of Dina Vierny (born Dina Aïbinder on January 12, 1919 in Kishinev) thus exhibited her Kitchen, all in suspended utensils and insults between neighbors scribbled on small loose papers, in 2014.

After perestroika and his exile in New York, Kabakov became a page of history. When he had his retrospective at the Garage, the art center of billionaire Roman Abramovich, in the fall of 2008 in Moscow, Ilya composed, with his wife Emilia, a pale gray labyrinth of paintings in fresh colors, partly obliterated, as if all memories were fragments, as if seeing everything, saying everything, was always impossible.