Ilya Kabakov (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

After spending some thirty years as an 'unofficial' artist behind the Iron Curtain of the former Soviet Union, Ilya Kabakov first came to the attention of the West in the 1980s. Today Kabakov is recognized as the most important Russian artist to have emerged in the late 20th century, with installations that speak as much about conditions in post-Stalinist Russia as they do about the human condition universally. His installations are, in some instances, akin to theatrical mise-en-scenes, reproducing a cramped communal apartment or a flooded art museum as a site of Schadenfreude-like comedies on human frustration and doomed aspirations. Alternating between light-hearted irony and genuine tragedy, Kabakov evokes a shadowy world lit by a twenty-watt bulb in which fable-like miracles might occur: a homespun cosmonaut may fly into space, or the radio/television aerial may spell out a poem against the sky. Ilya Kabakov's work has featured in the world's most significant surveys of contemporary art, among them Documenta IX (Kassel, Germany, 1992), and the Whitney Biennial (New York, 1997). In 1993 Kabakov represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale.