Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
dal 5/6/2014 al 11/7/2014
Segnalato da
5/6/2014
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Villa Kast, Salzburg
In all paintings they enter the world of the past and with the white void are brought back into the now, so the painter refers to a distinct genre or style by creating a new form. The first three distinct works are called The Four vPaintings about the Sun, a fourth work is Two Fragments and the last one is Variation of Baroque Theme.
The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to present new paintings by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in the exhibition Paintings about the Sun. The exhibition takes place in Salzburg at the Villa Kast from 6 June – 12 July 2014. The paintings show a new departure from Kabakov´s works now on view in his monumental installation The Strange City for Monumenta at the Grand Palais in Paris until 22 June, 2014.
llya Kabakov was born in 1933, Emilia Kabakov in 1945, both in Dnepropetrovsk (USSR). The Kabakovs have been working together collaboratively since 1989. They live and work in New York and have created large scale projects and ambitious installations throughout the world including the Russian Pavillion of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 and Documenta IX Kassel, Germany 1992.
Of the five new paintings that are shown in Salzburg, the breadth and latitude in Kabakov`s painted work can be clearly discerned. The first three distinct works are called The Four Paintings about the Sun, a fourth work that is overpowered by heavenly blues is called Two Fragments whilst the fifth is tackling the complexity of darkness called Variation of Baroque Theme.
The Four Paintings about Sun are an intricate construction of two layers of imagery taken from Kabakovʼs own drawings, and referring sometimes to 1950s memories. The images are carefully constructed and laid upon each other so that one image dominates the contrasting background of the other. The first layer is clearly a cut-out, whilst the background image covers the edge of the painting and both images are turning around the central dominating void of an illuminating white circle, that penetrates into the canvas referring to the sun. It is about the sun and how all turns around the sun and how the sun is always present within us. At the same time the theme of the void shows how energy can come out of the white. Here abstract forms are combined with those of reality.
In all three paintings we enter the world of the past and with the white void are brought back into the now, so the painter refers to a distinct genre or style by creating a new form. In The Four Paintings about Sun #2 we are invited to view a beautifully rendered metro station, almost empty. Only groups of six commuters, warmly dressed either sitting or standing and talking to each other, waiting for the train. One dominant figure is standing in the middle ground almost too close to the rails, it is however the station master in a warm long coat and a cap holding a traffic control sign representing an orderly arranged world. The background image shows the interior of an affluent happy family scene, two children and their parents gathered around a table under a yellow light reading together. We can just about imagine the idyllic family scene propagated by the ideals of the mid 20th century. However the central image of the metro station hides the central image of the family scene and therefore between commuters and home life creating a stark contrast full of tension with the white empty void.
The FourPaintings about Sun #3 applies the same principle only now we are in a lavish 19th century interior, officials sitting around a table, in ceremonial dress, a big chandelier framing the ceiling against the contrast of a the mountainous snow covered forest pine trees. The contrast is clear, that of the heated luxurious interior against the chills of an idyllic winter landscape with its tall pine trees, the round white void penetrating through what appears to be, the void.
In The Four Paintings about Sun #1 we are confronted with holiday skiers from the past coming down the mountain through beautiful forests, set however in the foreground against a late summer harvest, where the plowing machine shows the latest collective farming method. Again these fragmented images are turning around a white circle, the void that represents the sun depicted against the idyllic motherland.
In the painting Two Fragments we see collages of photographs of an entirely different colour palette - bright blues of the sunny sky painted in the colours of brief memories to Socialist propaganda films. The combination of these fragments in a sense denies their individual historical reality and at the same time forms a new combination.
Another work in the exhibition Variation of Baroque Theme refers to colour and layering of different styles. Coming from a truly conceptual background in which the concept always dominates the painting, here, Kabakov, frees himself so colour becomes the subject of the painting. To Kabakov the tradition of the Baroque defines the depth of the painting, its spatiality and the submersed state of all the objects.
ʻA very important point about my paintings is that I do not know who those people are, what kind of space that is, what they are doing there. This is essential I do not want to know. In classical painting, something is always known about the person depicted. I see a world, but I do not see it, I push it away. Itʼs like a dream, a nightmare, but yet you live in it”. (From Willelm Jan Renderʼs interview with the author Ilya Kabakov in Moscow 31 March 2013, published in Ilya Kabakovʼs catalogue raisonée, 2008-2013, Vol.III).
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MIRJAM KRAFT mirjam.kraft@ropac.at
Opening 6th June
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Villa Kast
Mirabellplatz 2A, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
Hours: Tuesday - Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 10am-2pm.