Ilya Kabakov, 89, Dies; Soviet-Born Artist Depicted Grimness With Wit

Ilya Kabakov, a celebrated artist whose immersive installations, work and drawings informed sardonically witty tales in regards to the desires and inside lives of those that had endured the deprivations and degradations of the Soviet period he grew up in, died on May 27 in a hospital close to his dwelling and studio in Mattituck, N.Y., on the East End of Long Island. He was 89.

He had been combating a coronary heart situation, his stepdaughter Viola Kanevsky mentioned.

For many years in Soviet Russia Mr. Kabakov was, by day, a widely known kids’s guide illustrator, a state-sponsored artist along with his personal studio and artwork provides (which he shared along with his underground artist pals). He created some 150 kids’s books earlier than 1988, when he left the nation for good.

Yet he was additionally main a double life as a conceptual artist. In the Seventies, he started making what he known as albums, a collection of whimsical drawings and work with tragic-comic characters who used their imaginations to flee the privations and indignities of the failed utopian experiment that was the Soviet Union. His albums had titles and situations that recalled the work of novelists like Mikhail Bulgakov, the writer of “The Master and Margarita,” a darkish 1967 satire of life beneath Stalin.

One album, “Sitting in the Closet Primakov,” was about a bit boy who retreats right into a closet with toys and scraps of rubbish, however desires of flying away and disappearing into the sky. Another was “Agonizing Surikov,” a couple of man who couldn’t see a whole image of the world in entrance of him; his vista — a teeny tiny panorama, a touch of blue sky — was like that seen by means of a peephole. And in “Decorator Malignin,” a bureaucrat doodled on the margins of paperwork in the course of the limitless, tedious conferences that made up his pointless working life.

“All of the characters were aspects of his own psyche, of his frustrations, his fears and his dreams,” Amei Wallach, who wrote the monograph “Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away” (1996), mentioned in a cellphone interview. And he housed his characters in what have been often known as communal flats, the standard dwelling association of the Soviet period, by which households have been crowded into single rooms carved out of what had usually been grand flats, sharing bogs with strangers and combating for assets and privateness. It was metaphor he would return to many times.

The albums have been rendered within the nameless fashion Mr. Kabakov had honed as a prolific state-approved illustrator. It was unlawful to point out something however state-sponsored artwork, so he would flow into his forbidden work in secret amongst his artist pals, like Eric Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev, members of a cadre of women and men who turned often known as the Moscow Conceptualists. Unlike the work of their Western counterparts, theirs was narrative- and character-driven, Mr. Kababov’s notably so.

“The whole time we expected to be arrested, for something terrible to happen,” Mr. Kabakov informed Andrew Solomon, who wrote about him in The New York Times Magazine in 1992. “But to us, nothing terrible ever happened. We just drank tea in one another’s kitchens, discussed and criticized one another’s work and traveled together in the summers.”

His title nonetheless started to unfold past his Moscow circle as small items of his have been smuggled in another country and proven within the West. In the mid Eighties, a curator put collectively a present of his work in Paris; one other staged one in Bern, Switzerland. Mr. Kabakov was unable to attend both.

On the day of the Bern present, he informed Mr. Solomon: “I invited all my friends to the forest, and we tied a red ribbon between two trees. At exactly noon, when we knew the exhibition was opening in the Kunsthalle, we cut the ribbon and drank a bottle of champagne. It was a very bittersweet moment, that this was happening but that I could never be there.”

By 1988, he was prepared to go away. He emigrated to Austria after which Paris earlier than selecting Long Island with the assistance of Emilia Kanevsky, a distant cousin who turned his promoter, producer and collaborator. They married in 1992, and over the many years they shared credit score on all of Mr. Kabakov’s installations, in a symbiotic partnership that recalled the bond between Christo and his spouse, Jeanne-Claude.

“Ilya Kabakov was Soviet society’s secret anthropologist,” the critic and curator Robert Storr wrote in his introduction to Ms. Wallach’s monograph. “Student of its myths and customs, ironic observer of its normal citizens, and sympathetic analyst of its eccentrics, he patiently assembled an image of collectivized life that the West could understand and the East could not fail to recognize.”

Ilya Josifovich Kabakov was born on Sep. 30, 1933, in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine. His mom, Bertha Ulievna Solodukhina, was a secretary in a vocational college; his father, Joseph Benzionovich Kabakov, who had skilled to be a locksmith, labored as a metallic employee in a manufacturing unit that made mattress components. Like many Soviet residents in Ukraine beneath Stalin’s reign, they have been terribly poor and malnourished.

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the household fled to Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In a accident, a prestigious artwork college had additionally been evacuated to that metropolis. One day, when Ilya was 10, he was cajoled by an older boy into sneaking into the grand constructing that the artwork college had commandeered. When they have been found by a girl, the older boy ran away, and Ilya was left standing agape in entrance of a gaggle of work; they contained a large number of bare ladies, and Mr. Kabakov later credited their erotic attract with altering his life. The lady invited him to use to the college, and he was instantly accepted.

When the struggle was over, Ilya went to a different prestigious college, the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow. His mom adopted him there, dwelling illegally, as a result of she didn’t have the correct papers, in a collection of terrible quarters, together with the toilet of a faculty the place she had discovered work as a janitor. She and Ilya’s father, a brutish man who had crushed his son and arrange home with different ladies, had parted methods when he returned from military service.

In 1992, for the ninth Documenta, an exhibition of latest artwork held each 5 years in Kassel, Germany, Mr. Kabakov paid homage to his mom’s harrowing expertise with an set up known as “The Toilet,” a meticulously grim reproduction of Soviet-style public bogs from the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s.

Inside the work, he created one other world inside the toilet stalls with the accouterments of a scruffy however cozy Soviet-era household residence, full with toys and furnishings. He informed an interviewer that the piece “concentrated a whole set of problems — homelessness, and defenselessness before the authorities, and the fact that a person of unbelievable decency, cleanliness and honesty was forced to drag out an existence in the most unbelievable place.”

That similar yr Mr. Kabakov was seemingly all over the place, ready eventually to stretch out with formidable installations on the Museum of Modern Art and the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York in addition to in exhibits throughout Europe.

“He took the West by storm,” mentioned Ms. Wallach, whose 2013 movie, “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here,” paperwork the couple’s return to Russia in 2008, when he was handled there like a nationwide treasure. She added, “When he finally did leave” within the late Eighties — in the course of the Perestroika years — “it was just the right moment for the West to celebrate a Soviet-born artist of his stature.”

“It may seem sudden,” David A. Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, mentioned of Mr. Kabakov’s newfound fame, as Mr. Solomon reported in 1992, “but you have to understand that he had been working out of sight for decades and that his whole lifetime of work was then discovered at once. Finding him was like stumbling across Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg in the full flush of their maturity.”

In addition to his stepdaughter, Ms. Kanevsky, Mr. Kabakov is survived by his spouse; a daughter, Galina, from his first marriage, which resulted in divorce; one other stepdaughter, Isis Kanevsky; 4 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

At dwelling within the West, Mr. Kabakov and his spouse continued to make elaborate installations, like “The Palace of Projects,” proven in Manhattan on the Armory in 2000 after stops in Madrid and London. The “Palace” was a spiral-shaped pavilion inside which have been 65 “projects,” or fictitious proposals — in textual content, photographs and fashions introduced by imaginary characters — for bettering the world, together with a ladder from which one may see angels and a soothing habitat made out of closets.