Ilya Kabakov is a famous Russian artist and one of the most important figures in contemporary art. He was a pioneer of conceptualism, one of the most successful movements in the Soviet art. If to measure contemporary art with a ruler, Malevich will mark zero as the starting point and Kabakov will mark one.

Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk. In 1957 he graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, where he specialised in graphic design. In 1963 he became a member of the USSR Union of Artists and in the same period he joined the circle of non-conformist artists of the Russian avant-garde.

Kabakov is an innovator: he rethought and reconstructed all the clutter of the Soviet post-Stalinist period. Later he developed his own model of the universe with its own rules and laws. He was one of the founders of the so-called Moscow conceptualism, from which Sots Art, one of the most well-known movements in the Soviet art of the 1970-1980s, later emerged. The birth of Sots Art became possible in the context of the alternate culture which confronted the state ideology of the time.

Ilya Kabakov was the author of the concept of “total installation” – a combination of paintings, texts, sounds and objects. In the eyes of the Western public he was a philosopher in painting and for his compatriots one of the most controversial artists.

Kabakov’s works displayed in museums and galleries worldwide continue to astonish visitors. He won popularity with the global public during the years of emigration and many other Russian artists who also moved abroad because of Perestroika envied him. No other contemporary artist had Kabakov’s success.

In 1992 Kabakov created a controversial installation which showed a Soviet public toilet where people had to enter conventional sectors for men and women. A year later another exhibition gathered a crowd of visitors who wanted to see Kabakov’s installation of twelve iron beds arrayed in a circle. This happened in the early 1990s and later came dozens of reviews in authoritative magazines, exhibitions, catalogues, the highest gallery prices and an endless flow of orders.

At present Ilya Kabakov is a citizen of the U.S. where he lives with his wife Emilia Kabakova.