Product Description

The dominant theme of Kabakov's oeuvre is the critical re-appropriation of one's own memories and recollections--a Proustian exercise in remembering that is particularly relevant to Kabakov's existence as an unofficial artist during the last decades of the Soviet Union. His first large installation, "Ten Characters"(1988), which re-staged a Soviet group apartment filled with junk and miscellaneous objects left by its previous inhabitants. In contrast to Minimalist and Conceptualist trends in installation work, Kabakov's installations give the viewer a voyeuristic look at a private realm that is by turns imaginary and autobiographical. In this space we find a recollection of the often alienating and de-socializing aspects of the Soviet regime at its worst--the fear wrought by state terror, the denunciation of neighbor by neighbor. To this day Kabakov's art continues address Kabakov's recapitulation of his own past, a mnemonic landscape still tightly bound up with the loss of meaning in Soviet society. This catalogue raisonn provides, for the first time, a comprehensive presentation of Kabakov's installations from 1983 through the spring of 2000. Every installation is documented with full-color photographs, as well as enlightening textual commentary by Kabakov himself. 2 Volumes, clothbound, 9.5 x 11.75 inches, 1008 pages, 455 color and 495 black & white illustrations

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1507092 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-02
• Format: Box set
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1008 pages

About the Author
Born in Dnepopetrovsk, USSR, in 1933, Ilya Kabakov graduated from the V.A. Surikov Art Academy, Moscow, in 1957, and joined the Soviet Artist's Union in 1965. After winning numerous prizes for his art all over the world and on both sides of the Iron Curtain-particularly after the late 1980s onset of "perestroika" allowed him to build a career in the West-Kabakov settled in New York City in 1992, where he continues to live and work, along with his wife Emilia.

"A person has left traces in the world. Has created nothing new in the world, nothing not already there, but has gone and left traces--and not in some metaphoric sense but rather entirely prosaically: that someone has walked across a freshly scrubbed floor in street shoes." --Ilya Kabakov