Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

This catalogue presents the artwork of three fictitious Russian artists, all inventions of Ilya Kabakov, a leading figure in installation art and arguably the most important living Soviet unofficial artist. Through this body of work, Kabakov imagines an alternative outcome of the Soviet experiment, one that embraces both the populist spirit and idealized subjects of socialist realism and utopian symbolism of abstraction. A recent exhibition of two of Kabakov’s imaginary characters in a “total installation” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov, confronted art historical and museological tropes: the model of the provincial artist; the nature of the museum retrospective; and the epoch of the avant-garde. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue functions wryly as history lesson, morality tale, social critique and personal homage for an artist who has witnessed the failed utopian experiment of the Soviet Union, both as a citizen and an émigré.