The Tel Aviv Art Museum hosts a large exhibition in memory of Ilya Kabakov

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art was one of the first to respond to the death of Ilya Kabakov, who passed away at the end of May, with a large exhibition. And now it is not so important whether it was conceived in advance or whether it is a posthumous show – Kabakov himself did everything to ensure that the past and future times were equivalent in his artistic biography. In this context, the exhibition titled “Tomorrow We’ll Fly Away” speaks primarily about the unity of the artist’s view, in which the child and the old man peacefully coexist. Watched Kira Dolinina.

The exhibition in Tel Aviv is large, but not retrospective. Here there is no living room combined with a station toilet, there is no little man who flew into space from his communal kennel, there are no angels breaking through the heavens, no one sings in the toilet in the morning. That is, a viewer who knows who Ilya Kabakov is will not find in the exposition the most shocking and recognizable works that have swept around the world over the past 35 years and turned their author into the most famous Russian artist. And he won’t find a “Russian” artist here either – according to the passport and facts, Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, the acute phase of geopolitical upheavals dictates writing him down as a “Ukrainian”, although both are relative – Kabakov arrived in Moscow in 1945 as a Jewish boy , whose artistic abilities led him to the only direction possible at that time: to the Moscow Art School and the Surikov Institute after it.

This point in Kabakov’s biography is the starting point for the exhibition. The absolute genius of the total installation for the most part of the exposition fools the little prepared viewers with “academic” painting. Sometimes written under his own name, sometimes under the name of Charles Rosenthal, an artist of the early twentieth century, invented by him; sometimes with an original plot, and sometimes almost copying Caravaggio or Repin; sometimes whole, full-length, and sometimes cropped in the most barbaric way. Of course, you can get a grasp of the plots (here are the Stalinist party purges, and the heroes of “They Didn’t Wait”, and the lute player, and the crowd of disembodied figures flying into the bright sky), but we are talking primarily about painting as such. As about the troubles of childhood of a gifted child, as about the main derivative of the fine arts in general, as about what you should refuse, and what you will definitely return to anyway.

Most of the work was written in the last decade, in the New York studio of Kabakov, where, over time, canvases and paintings have greatly moved complex installations or albums of the finest conceptual elaboration.

The “naive” Israeli viewer, accustomed to old museum art (the art of paintings) is much less than European, first encounters images that are completely incomprehensible to him: what does a lady who has passed (!) party purge mean, and what are faceless young men at faceless tables, sitting under picture on the same party theme, the devil knows. However, gradually the text about painting unfolds, reaching its climax in the installation “Where is our place?” (2002), which turns the museum visitor into a midget, walking between two giant pairs of legs and seeing only the lower quarter of the paintings hung in this giant museum. And, of course, absolute catharsis awaits him in the hall of one of Kabakov’s most famous total installations, The Empty Museum (1993), where, to the triumphant sounds of Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor, he finds himself in a kind of museum hall, ideal as an ancient tomb in the emptiness of its walls.

The art of Ilya Kabakov has an amazing ability to evoke the most polar feelings in the audience. In one of his most representative retrospectives, in Russia in 2018, the amplitude of reactions was maximum: in the St. Petersburg Hermitage it was one of the saddest exhibitions of contemporary art, people came out crying; in Moscow in the Tretyakov Gallery, the same works, built by a different architect, told a funny story and full of irony over the past. The fact that in four years the past will return to us, then almost no one understood, therefore both laughter and tears were natural. The current exhibition is impassive, it does not include the heart-rending Diary of My Mother (1990), but it is crowned with the permanent hit “Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future” (2001), where the red lights of the train leave the artist’s works “doomed” to oblivion on the platform. Program castling (“I” Kabakov changes to “we”) involves us in a very difficult conversation. Difficult – after all, “tomorrow we will fly away.”