“Stars suddenly floated, the earth shrank terribly, and I felt myself uncertain on the surface of this small ball. I saw that space was coming up from behind me, together with my planet, and my brain began to explode from horror.” said Ilya Kabakov. The same experience of cosmic horror is essential to the medium of total installation, with which the Kabakov name is so closely associated. Methodologically speaking, it might be said that all of the Ilya and Emilia Kabkov's duo’s installations are in some way or another connected with a special structured experience of space, echoing the transformations of the starry sky. But there is one installation in which the sky also becomes the center of gravity. We are talking about perhaps their most famous installation, "The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment", first shown in the Kabakovs’ Moscow studio in 1985.

Nach den Terroranschlägen der Hamas wurde das Tel Aviv Museum of Art geschlossen. Nun kann man dort wieder eine Restrospektive von Ilya und Emilia Kabakov besuchen ("Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Tomorrow We Fly", Tel Aviv Museum of Art, bis 24. Januar). Ihre skeptische, aber menschenfreundliche Kunst erscheint notwendiger denn je Endlich davonfliegen: Wahrscheinlich war es der Traum, der Enge und Schwere der irdischen Verhältnisse zu entfliehen, der die Sowjetunion über sieben Jahrzehnte ideell zusammenhielt. Nicht zufällig beginnen schon Marc Chagalls Figuren um 1917, als die Revolution erst anbricht, abzuheben. [...] Auch Ilya und Emilia Kabakovs monumentales Gemälde "Flying" steht in dieser geistigen Tradition. Das derzeit in Tel Aviv ausgestellte Bild verbindet Chagalls poetische Verwandlung des Alltags ein Stück weit mit dem Machbarkeitspathos der Sowjetmacht. Das 2022 vollendete, über acht Meter breite Bild zeigt, wie eine unüberschaubare Menschenmenge ihrem irdisch-dörflichen Dasein davonfliegt.

The first large exhibition of the groundbreaking Russian-born, American-based artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, opened this week at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (from July 18, 2023 to January 20, 2024.), some six weeks after Ilya’s death. Considered to be the most famous artists of their generation to have emerged from the Soviet Union, the couple had wanted to have an exhibition in Israel for a long time, said curator Shahar Molcho, who worked with the Kabakovs on this exhibition for the last two years. 

Ilya Kabakov, an artist whose expansive works sharply directed their aim at the imploded dreams of the Soviet Union, ushering in new possibilities for installation art in the process, died on Saturday at 89. His death was announced by his family that same day. In vast installations, Kabakov took up the many failures of the Soviet Union, where he lived for decades before departing for the West. By building out the worlds of imagined characters via room-size artworks, Kabakov offered heightened versions of the reality he lived for viewers across the globe.

“The Ukrainian Museum has been around for 46 years. It started no differently than a lot of museums in New York; the one that comes to mind is the Jewish Museum, which started as an immigrant museum—same thing here—then 30 or 40 years ago they moved beyond that. We started that process a few years ago, and we're moving beyond being an immigrant museum to embrace everything that has to do with Ukrainian art and culture,” says Doroshenko. “Obviously the war has shed a giant spotlight with what that is.”

Born in the Soviet Union, the artist reflects on how works by her and husband Ilya have taken on new meaning since the war.

The artist couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov live and create at a home and studio on Long Island, New York. The Art Newspaper met with them there and spoke to Emilia about the often prophetic nature of art and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where both artists were born.

The benefit for Médecins Sans Frontières will be held during Christie’s Marquee 20/21 Sales of 20th and 21st Century Art in May and will include a collection of donated works by Ukrainian and international artists such as Yoshimoto Nara’s caricature portraits of girls (with estimates of $100,000-$150,000 and $80,000-$120,000), Boris Mikhailov’s 1970s Soviet life series Yesterday’s Sandwich (est. $3,000-$5,000), and works by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Olafur Eliasson.