Ilya Kabakov was born September 30, 1933, in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Dnipro, Ukraine), to a locksmith father.!
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are ex-Soviet, American-based artists who 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.
Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Union, in 1933.
Ilya Kabakov—who was born in Ukraine, made his reputation in the Soviet Union, and settled in the United States for the last quarter of his life.
He studied at the VA Surikov Art Academy in Moscow, and began his career as a children's book illustrator during the 1950's. He was part of a group of Conceptual artists in Moscow who worked outside the official Soviet art system.
In 1985 he received his first solo show exhibition at Dina Vierny Gallery, Paris, and he moved to the West two years later taking up a six months residency at Kunstverein Graz, Austria. In 1988 Kabakov began working with his future wife Emilia (they were to be married in 1992).
From this point onwards, all their work was collaborative, in differen