Ilya Kabakov

After some thirty years as an 'unofficial' artist in the former Soviet Union, Ilya Kabakov first came to international recognition in the late 1980s. Now based in New York, he is considered the most important Russian artist to have emerged in the late twentieth century. His installations are often akin to theatrical mise-en-scenes, presenting a cramped communal apartment or a flooded art museum as though they are comedies on human frustration and doomed aspirations. Alternating between lighthearted irony and genuine tragedy, Kabakov evokes a shadowy world lit by a 20-watt bulb in which fable-like miracles might occur: a homespun cosmonaut may fly into space, or an ordinary radio/television aerial may spell out a poem against the sky.