(born in Dnjepropetrovsk/Ukraine in 1933 - lives and works in New York)
Landscape with a barge, signed and titled in Cyrillic and dated 2002 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 89 x 138 cm, in artist’s frame

Provenance:
The artist
Galerie Michael Kewenig, Cologne
Harrie van der Moesdijk Collection, the Netherlands

Exhibited:
Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov, 9 September 2004 – 2 January 2005, exh. cat. page 169
Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Retrospective, 15 September - 18 October 2008, exh. cat. ill.

Literature:
Renate Petzinger (ed.), Ilya Kabakov: Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings 1957 – 2008, Bielefeld, 2009, Vol. II, page 135, ill.

In his artistic oeuvre, which ranges from panel paintings to large room installations, Ilya Kabakov engages critically with the real socialist society of his homeland and with Social Realism, with an intensity that often approaches lyricism. Born in Ukraine in 1933, Ilya Kabakov attended the Surikov Art Academy in Moscow and worked first as an illustrator of children’s books. In 1987, he emigrated from the Soviet Union and has lived since then in New York.
The present painting, Landscape with a barge, 1972 (2002) was first shown in 2005 in the exhibition The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov in the Contemporary Museum of Modern Art in Cleveland. The picture was part of a huge installation which put forth an “alternative” history of 20th-century Russian painting through three imaginary artists: Charles Rosenthal, Ilya Kabakov and Igor Spivak.

The three artists, who derive entirely from Kabakov’s imagination, take shape by means of their work. In this complex play with the doubling of identities, style and authorship, ‘Ilya Kabakov’ is conceived of as a successor of Rosenthal, who worked mainly in the 1970s, and as having been inspired to his own work by the paintings of his mentor. The real Kabakov functions, in the framework of his invention, as a curator who has discovered the unknown artists and who offers commentary on their art. In this context, he expresses himself in the exhibition catalogue on the topic of his doppelgänger’s pictures:

“ I. Kabakov belonged to another generation that had grown up in USSR, a generation that had no more ‘bright hopes,’ neither in the present, nor even more so, in the future. Therefore he replaces the white space behind Rosenthal’s paintings with a dark, murky gloom. Something is going on in this space, it is rustling about; there is some kind of infinite, unfathomable chaos living beyond the fine film of visible reality. But our reality attempts to hide what might be seen behind it, and the viewer is left with the impression of a kind of balancing between these two things.” (Ilya Kabakov: An alternative History of Art: Rosenthal – Kabakov – Spivak, Katalog: Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2005, p. 162)

The painting Landscape with a barge, 1972 (2002) is dominated by the convergence of various pictorial levels and realities: the atmospheric, almost impressionistic portrayal of the river landscape, a typical theme of Soviet genre painting, and the geometrically abstract form of the dark rectangle, as a reference to the radical nature of Russian modernism.

Provenance:
The artist
Galerie Michael Kewenig, Cologne
Collection Harrie van der Moesdijk, the Netherlands

Exhibited:
Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov, 9 September 2004 – 2 January 2005, exh. cat. page 169
Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Retrospective, 15 September - 18 October 2008, exh. cat. ill.

Literature:
Renate Petzinger (ed.), Ilya Kabakov: Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings 1957 – 2008, Bielefeld, 2009, Vol. II, page 135, ill.

In his artistic oeuvre, which ranges from panel paintings to large room installations, Ilya Kabakov engages critically with the real socialist society of his homeland and with Social Realism, with an intensity that often approaches lyricism. Born in Ukraine in 1933, Ilya Kabakov attended the Surikov Art Academy in Moscow and worked first as an illustrator of children’s books. In 1987, he emigrated from the Soviet Union and has lived since then in New York.
The present painting, Landscape with a barge, 1972 (2002) was first shown in 2005 in the exhibition The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov in the Contemporary Museum of Modern Art in Cleveland. The picture was part of a huge installation which put forth an “alternative” history of 20th-century Russian painting through three imaginary artists: Charles Rosenthal, Ilya Kabakov and Igor Spivak.

The three artists, who derive entirely from Kabakov’s imagination, take shape by means of their work. In this complex play with the doubling of identities, style and authorship, ‘Ilya Kabakov’ is conceived of as a successor of Rosenthal, who worked mainly in the 1970s, and as having been inspired to his own work by the paintings of his mentor. The real Kabakov functions, in the framework of his invention, as a curator who has discovered the unknown artists and who offers commentary on their art. In this context, he expresses himself in the exhibition catalogue on the topic of his doppelgänger’s pictures:

“ I. Kabakov belonged to another generation that had grown up in USSR, a generation that had no more ‘bright hopes,’ neither in the present, nor even more so, in the future. Therefore he replaces the white space behind Rosenthal’s paintings with a dark, murky gloom. Something is going on in this space, it is rustling about; there is some kind of infinite, unfathomable chaos living beyond the fine film of visible reality. But our reality attempts to hide what might be seen behind it, and the viewer is left with the impression of a kind of balancing between these two things.” (Ilya Kabakov: An alternative History of Art: Rosenthal – Kabakov – Spivak, Katalog: Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2005, p. 162)

The painting Landscape with a barge, 1972 (2002) is dominated by the convergence of various pictorial levels and realities: the atmospheric, almost impressionistic portrayal of the river landscape, a typical theme of Soviet genre painting, and the geometrically abstract form of the dark rectangle, as a reference to the radical nature of Russian modernism.