Ilya Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov's installation presents a shabby Soviet communal room whose occupant has apparently launched himself through the ceiling. The work, first made in the 1980s, turns a tiny apartment into a fantasy of escape from Soviet everyday life.

Kabakov worked inside the Soviet Union while making art that used documents, fictional characters, bureaucratic language, and staged environments. Those methods connect him to Moscow Conceptualism, a movement very different from Western Pop art or Minimalism.

Kabakov later made many major installations in collaboration with Emilia Kabakov, his wife and artistic partner. Their joint work helped bring Soviet communal life, memory, and utopian failure into international museums.

He began with drawing and painting, including work as a children's book illustrator in the Soviet Union, but he is best known internationally for installations. Works such as "The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment" made the whole room, not just the picture surface, the artwork.