In 1988 visitors to the Ron Feldman gallery in New York were introduced to The Man Who Describes His Life Through Other Characters. Living with nine others, one to a room, in a faithfully recreated, grimly grey Soviet apartment, the character was the most autobiographical of many guises adopted by the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who has died aged 89.
The visitor did not actually meet Kabakov’s alter ego, but could determine his personality, and that of his neighbours, ranging from The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away to The Man Who Collects the Opinions of Others, through their personal possessions and a series of short introductory texts. The first character “looked in the mirror and saw himself”, a plaque told the visitor. “On the other hand, thinking about something, he saw in himself not one but many. He made a decision: to unite this diversity into a kind of artistic whole.”
For Kabakov that “artistic whole” was installation art, a medium he made his own. These immersive environments drew on the everyday aesthetics of his first 50 years in the Soviet Union, as well as the absurdism and dark melancholia of Russian and Ukrainian literature, to comment on grand political ideas of utopia and dystopia, inner turmoil and social alienation.
The first of what Kabakov called his “total environments” was created in 1984, the year before his work was first shown in Russia. The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment featured the home of an amateur cosmonaut. The visitor was presented with a room wallpapered by propaganda posters, containing a jerry-built catapult, with a human-sized hole smashed in the ceiling. Kabakov intended the work as a symbol of escape, a satirical swipe at the USSR’s space ambitions and a commentary on individual freedom versus collective responsibility. It was first installed in his studio, in a secret exhibition that only a small number of trusted friends were allowed to see.
“Life consisted of two layers,” Kabakov recalled of Soviet repression. “Any person – a factory worker, farm worker, intellectual, artist – had a split personality. From childhood, everyone knew what was necessary in order to survive in this country – how you had to lie, how to adapt, what to draw, what to sing, how to dance.”
Born in Dnipropetrovsk, USSR (now Dnipro, Ukraine), Ilya was the son of Iosif Kabakov, a locksmith, and Bertha Solodukhina, an accountant. During the second world war Iosif was conscripted to fight, and in 1941 Bertha and Ilya were evacuated to Samarkand, Uzbekistan. By chance the Leningrad Academy of Arts had also been moved to the city and the boy enrolled in classes. Four years later the school returned to its base, but bureaucracy halted Ilya’s wish to follow his teachers. Instead he went to study in Moscow, and took courses in graphic design and book illustration at the VI Surikov State Art Institute.
In 1957 he started working with state publishing houses, joining the state artists’ union, mostly illustrating children’s books. It was unfulfilling, but provided him with a studio and time to make his own clandestine work. His breakthrough came in 1965 with Shower, a series of 20 colour pencil drawings depicting a naked man looking angst-ridden and, in some, forlorn at the lack of water coming out of the pipes. The works were smuggled out of the country for an exhibition at the Castello Spagnolo in L’Aquila, Italy, and, despite the Khrushchev-era thaw in repression, the escapade got the artist suspended from the union for four years.
He was not cowed, and a scene emerged around his studio, with his fellow renegades Erik Bulatov, Viktor Pivovarov, Vladimir Yankilevsky and Oleg Vassiliev providing friendship and an audience. Kabakov started a series of text paintings that parodied party documents and propaganda literature and, from 1972 to 1975, produced a set of 10 loose-leaf books, each describing different Soviet personality types. Kabakov would “perform” these at a lectern for his small circle.
“The life that had been established in the 1960s monotonously melded into the 1970s and 1980s,” Kabakov recalled. Then a visiting Swiss diplomat heard about his work and took examples back to Berne. This led to a show at the city’s Kunsthalle in 1985, which travelled to museums in Marseille and Düsseldorf. Kabakov was not allowed to attend the openings.
Two years later, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost eased the restrictions, the artist was allowed to accept a residency at Graz Kunstverein, Austria. His return to Moscow was brief and in 1988 he emigrated to New York. “The Soviet wave had arrived,” Kabakov said. “There was huge interest from curators and museum people. I was included in this process as some sort of exotic character.” The following year he had shows in London, at the ICA and Riverside Studios.
Kabakov was joined in the US by his second cousin Emilia Kanevsky (nee Lekach). As his installations grew in ambition, she became his collaborator and co-author, working from a studio in Long Island. In 1992 they married.
Their 1990 work Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album), featured Kabakov singing songs from his childhood, recordings that wafted through rooms containing typewritten excerpts of the memoir the artist persuaded his mother to write before her death. More biting was the Red Army marching music that provided the soundtrack to The Toilet, first installed at Documenta in 1992, which featured a set of apartments entered through the wreckage of a Russian public lavatory.
The following year the couple took part in the Venice Biennale (they would show again in the main exhibition in 2003) with Red Pavilion, a small building built in the grounds of Russia’s permanent gallery, itself left empty. It was intended as commentary on the years outside society the couple had endured.
Their 2017 retrospective at Tate Modern travelled to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Tretyakov museum in Moscow. It was a rare return for Kabakov. Last year, Emilia, speaking for them both, said: “When we made the Red Pavilion, we thought that the USSR would return, but we did hope that it would not happen. Thirty years later it is here again … the totalitarian regime.”
Kabakov is survived by Emilia, his daughter, Galina, from a previous relationship, two stepdaughters, Isis and Viola, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
• Ilya Kabakov, artist, born 30 September 1933; died 27 May 2023
