Ilya Kabakov
The Contemporary, Atlanta
September 9 - October 21, 2000
THE CONTEMPORARY, ATLANTA
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318
thecontemporary.org
The Contemporary, Atlanta
September 9 - October 21, 2000
ILYA KABAKOV emerged from the tight-knit underground community of dissident artists in Moscow in the 1980s into one of the most celebrated international artists of the 1990s. Expatriated from Russia, Ilya Kabakov lives primarily in New York and creates installations (often involving extensive narrative texts written by him) in museums and exhibitions.
Ilya Kabakov has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (The Bridge, 1995) and in the Venice Biennale (The Red Pavilion, 1993 and We Were in Kyoto, 1997). He focuses on the tiniest scraps that one encounters in the ordinary course of a day—a crumpled gum wrapper, a bent nail, a snapshot or a common postcard. His paintings, stories and installations are fantastic tales, provoked in this way by the trivialities of daily experience.
Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Boat of My Life, addresses his flight from the Nazis to Samarkand at the age of 9 with his parents as well as his internal exile. It also speaks to the persecutions of a "Jewish national" within postwar Russia, and his emigration to New York in the spring of 1988 at the beginning of the Cold War thaw. The show was organized by Jonathan Fineberg, Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is accompanied by a catalogue.
THE CONTEMPORARY, ATLANTA
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318
thecontemporary.org
