Ilya Kabakov

Mr. Costa, Cultural General of Brazil in Moscow (acquired directly from the artist)
The Collection of Roman Tabakman

Ilya Kabakov was a leader of the Moscow Conceptualist School in the Soviet unofficial art movement. Much of Kabakov's oeuvre involves the combination of word and image, a practice that, as the artist has often noted in his interviews and writings, resulted from his many years illustrating children's books. Kabakov's word/image work is largely in the form of albums, which he started developing in the spring of 1972. Kabakov embraced the album format for several reasons, among them the possibility of introducing the "fourth dimension"--time--into his work. The artist would show his albums, composed of similar-sized sheets housed in folders, to groups of four to ten people at a time. The viewer was to turn the pages one by one--an action that, as Kabakov envisioned it, was to result in an experience comparable to that of watching a theatrical performance.

Kabakov's albums, which present a model of a fictional Soviet citizen who is a "small man" fully subordinate to the collective social mindset, feature seemingly unrelated statements and comments issued by a range of "voices." For this reason, the text in Kabakov's albums takes on a sense of anonymity, even a group identity. This quality is heightened by the artist's use of the language of billboards, posters, and Soviet official documents that exerted a fatal control over the life of every Soviet citizen.

Kabakov has created a total of fifty albums. The first ten, produced by the artist in the early 1970s under the collective title Ten Characters, are considered the most significant.