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21/10/2010

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

The Model, Sligo

Angelology is a new large-scale installation project by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at The Model. This project takes the theme of angels—humanity's imagination and romanticisation of angels especially—as its beginning point, and includes paintings, sculpture and mixed-media installations that fill the entire Model exhibition spaces.

Within the Kabakovs' work, one can sense a tremendous desire for the betterment of humanity by humanity. Beyond religious ideologies, and not caught simply within sentimentalist, storybook narratives, their work employs the museum or gallery as a site of constructing a humanist universalism, often from forgotten pieces of history or via a recoding of familiar tropes, such as that of the angel. Ilya Kabakov has written of "the aura which comes from our past" as being "what stops us from sinking into oblivion, and what we call our culture, our interior world." While philosophical nihilism and pessimism are often popular forms of representing the world, and in fact only perpetuate the world's difficulties, the Kabakovs remind us, gently, of social utopias, child-like fantasy, faith in humanity, all without proselytising or moralising, for their gesture also contains a tender embrace of hopeful improvement for humanity, and a form of faith in its potential. Open and accessible, Angelology asks us to reconsider what we do really want to leave and to produce for future generations.

The Kabakovs are Russia’s foremost living artists. In 2008 they launched the Garage Centre for contemporary art in Moscow, exhibiting their total installations for the first time in twenty years since they left the country, and their exhibition Incident at the Museum and Other Installations at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in 2004 was the first exhibition by living Russian artists ever to be held there.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are Russian-born, American-based artists that collaborate on environments which fuse elements of the everyday with those of the conceptual. While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, their work still attains a universal significance.

Their work has been shown in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Documenta IX, at the Whitney Biennial in 1997 and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg among others. In 1993 they represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale with their installation The Red Pavilion. The Kabakovs have also completed many important public commissions throughout Europe and have received a number of honors and awards, including the Oscar Kokoschka Preis, Vienna, in 2002 and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, in 1995.

The Kabakovs live and work in Long Island.

A publication with texts by Seamus Kealy, Director / Curator at The Model, and Rod Mengham, reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College, accompanies the exhibition.

Related programm:

23 Oct: Angelic Conversations: 8 - 12 year olds

Other Events
9 Nov: A Ruby Tuesday tour of the galleries
As part of our new programme for over 55s, join us on a tour of Angelology, exploring the themes of the exhibition and the lives of these Russian artists. 11am

On view:

Seamus Nolan
Trades Club Revival
10 Sep. 2010 – 19 Jan. 2011 / The Model is delighted to present the culmination of The Trades Club Revival an exciting community-based project with one of Ireland’s most promising young artists, Seamus Nolan.

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Flight
02 Oct. 2010 – 10 Jan. 2011
Free / Drawn from The Niland Collection, the exhibition Flight explores the way in which artists from the collection have represented otherworldly beings or used mystical visions in their work.
The exhibition celebrates the way in which artists have given free flight to their imaginations and indulged in visions of angels, gods, saints, warriors, and fairies. On the other hand Flight will consider the way in which artists have drawn on classical and biblical imagery to present nightmarish allegories of the political or social disarray of their own times.
This exhibition features many of the collection’s most popular artists including Jack B Yeats, Louis le Brocquy, Patrick Hall and George (AE) Russell.

Press contact:
Denise Rushe +353 (0)71 9141405 deniserushe@modelart.ie

Opening Friday, Oct 22 from 6 – 8pm

The Model, home of The Niland Collection
The Mall Sligo, Ireland
Opening hours:
11am – 5.30pm Tuesday – Saturday
Late on Thursdays to 8pm
Sundays 12pm – 5pm
Closed Mondays
Admission Free

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