Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away - Hardcover

Wallach, Amei; Kabakov, Ilya; Storr, Robert (Int); Kabakov, Ilya (Art)

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9780810935259: Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810935252 ISBN 13: 9780810935259

Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1996

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This is the first comprehensive monograph on an important contemporary artist, one who has come to represent the Russian avant-garde in the post-Stalinist era much in the way that Joseph Beuys was a stimulus for European art after World War II. In her fascinating text, Amei Wallach draws on extensive research and interviews with Kabakov and his circle over the past eight years, and puts the work in the context of the artist's life and the social, historical, cultural, and political forces that have shaped it - from his boyhood during Stalin's regime, to his obligatory career as a children's book illustrator in the official Artists' Union, to his involvement in Moscow's furtive and fertile underground avant-garde of artists and writers, to his more recent travels in the international art circuit.
This groundbreaking volume also includes an introduction by Robert Storr, a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and commentaries by the artist himself that accompany the 290 illustrations, including paintings, drawings, albums, and sketches and photographs of installations.

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Review:

A successful illustrator of children's books, Ilya Kabakov rose to international prominence in the 1970s when he became the leading member of a group of dissident artists known as the Moscow Conceptualists. Art critic Amei Wallach follows the important steps in Kabakov's development as an artist, from his colored-pencil narrative works of the 70s to his "total installations" in the 80s that consisted of, among other things text, sounds, photographs, illustrations, kitchen items, and garbage. In the 90s, Kabakov's work has been seen at the Museum of Modern Art.

From Publishers Weekly:

Kabakov, who left the Soviet Union in 1988 and now lives in New York City, is well known in the West as a Russian conceptual artist, but he has yet to have an exhibit in Moscow, according to this lavishly illustrated monograph. Born in 1933 in Ukraine amid forced starvation and collectivization, his sense of being an outsider reinforced by his Jewishness, Kabakov freewheelingly deconstructs the lies, absurdities, betrayals, psychological deprivations, linguistic dislocations and self-deceptions of day-to-day Soviet unreality. His installations The Toilet (1992), portraying communal life in an outhouse, and My Homeland (The Flies) (1991), an airborne, hierarchical realm populated with insects, give the lie to the Soviet heaven-on-earth. Paintings, drawings, albums with movable pages and paperwork collages that mock official posters and instructions transcend their immediate Soviet context, forming a quirky art full of spiritual yearning, obsessed characters, mazes, flying boys, fear and loathing of bureaucracy. Wallach is arts commentator for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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