Culture | Contemporary art

Coast of Utopia

The Kabakovs’ brave new world

Cupola of dreams

FEW Russian artists can be described as world-class. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are an exception. The exiled couple have work in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, as well as in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Ilya, now 80, is the most successful living Russian artist; in 2008 a painting of his sold at auction for a record $5.8m. They are based on Long Island, New York, where Ilya paints continuously and dreams up large-scale installations that Emilia makes happen.

The Kabakovs’ best-known works portray the stifling atmosphere of the Soviet Union and evoke the universal human quest for a better life. “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment” (1981-88) is a ramshackle room with its ceiling torn off by a character who has catapulted himself into the cosmos. “The Toilet” (1992) is a Soviet-style public lavatory converted into a home, its living and sleeping areas squeezed next to a row of open WC stalls.

The Kabakovs’ most ambitious installation opens on May 10th as part of Monumenta, an annual series commissioned for the Grand Palais in Paris. (Past participants include Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra and Anish Kapoor.) Entitled “The Strange City”, it is a 1,500 square-metre (16,146 square-foot) walled metropolis made of painted wood. Outside the city entrance a huge metallic cupola (design, pictured), beaming with coloured lights and playing music, illuminates an ancient gate. The city itself contains five shrine-like enclosures: immersive environments where, rather than focusing on paintings or sculpture, visitors are made to stop and think. One temple-like chamber contains the maquette of an enchanted Tibetan city, ringed by miniature mountains that are a conduit to the hereafter. Another has a figure at the top of a ladder desperately reaching out to an angel. A third is a futuristic science laboratory that strives to communicate with outer space, believed to be the repository of man’s creative energies. The Kabakovs’ message is clear: mankind is forever in need of spirituality and higher meaning.

Ilya describes the Monumenta installation as a fantasy land where viewers can escape their daily grind and enjoy an otherworldly experience. His artistic concerns today are more humanistic and universal, he says, and no longer focused on the Soviet Union. The exhibition’s only explicitly Soviet references are in two final “chapels” where Ilya’s paintings are on display, some of them incorporating fragments of Soviet propaganda imagery.

Ilya left his homeland for good in 1987, when an Austrian museum, the Kunstverein in Graz, offered him a six-month residency to make an exhibition. He has no nostalgia for his homeland—“I hate the Soviet Union.” In the 54 years that he lived there he could never speak his mind. During one 22-year stretch, Ilya exhibited his work for a total of just two nights. Instead, he filled his time working as a children’s book illustrator, drawing and painting on the side. He later joined a circle of Moscow conceptual artists before taking up installation art in the 1980s.

He and Emilia are distant cousins who married in exile in 1992. Ilya subsequently asked her to cosign his work. Emilia, 68, says she does everything except paint, and allows him to make more and bigger installations than he otherwise would, more than 300 of them since 1988. She also raises funds to help create their work, a task which has become more pressing as Western governments slash museum budgets.

In 2008 Dasha Zhukova, partner of Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire, held a Kabakov exhibition at her Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. One installation, “The Red Wagon”, is now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Ms Zhukova and Mr Abramovich also bought a collection of Ilya’s work (at Emilia’s request) to save it from being broken up and sold off piece by piece.

As visibly successful Russian artists in exile, the Kabakovs face a particular pressure: the growing importance of patrons from Russia and the increasing appetite of rich Russian buyers for their work. Monumenta’s biggest sponsor is Novatek, Russia’s second-largest natural-gas producer, led by Leonid Mikhelson, another Russian billionaire. Emilia is also adamant that their work should not be tainted by dirty money or quickly resold by investors seeking instant gains. She has refused to sell paintings to a hedge fund, and turned away cash-wielding oligarchs whose fortunes she believed to be of questionable origin. Of President Vladimir Putin and his annexation of Crimea, Emilia, who was born in Ukraine, says: “You can take a person out of the Soviet Union, but you can’t take the Soviet Union out of them.” Mr Putin, she says, is trying to change the world, promising people paradise and Utopia, when “Utopias don’t work in reality.”

The Kabakovs’ own version of Utopia, meanwhile, may well be Ilya’s last great burst of creativity—much like Matisse’s paper cutouts or Picasso’s brash late works. The Kabakovs are not religious. But even the greatest atheist would like to believe there is something after death, Emilia says. That “something” is what “The Strange City” sets out to explore. It might just be Ilya Kabakov’s monumental sign-off.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Coast of Utopia"

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