Ilya & Emilia Kabakov's new exhibition will be held at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, featuring painting works. 

Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933, Emilia Kabakov was born in 1945, both in Dnepropetrovsk (USSR). The Kabakovs have been working together collaboratively since 1989. They live and work in New York.
They have worked on 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. In May 2014, they were commissioned by Monumenta to create "The Strange City" for the Grand Palais's nave in Paris.
From the beginning of Ilya Kabakov’s work as a children’s book illustrator in Russia, the white page has often been a fulcrum in the ideology of his work. It is both the ground upon which the artist stands to express his perception of the moment, and it has been his cloak, the fabric in which he can hide his true nature and character. It is both a place for story telling, and a place that denies this at the same time. In the series of paintings, The Canon, we see Kabakov in his boldest position thus far, the paintings are almost entirely white with a square grid pattern on the surface. Most recently in a far more romantic vein, Kabakov began working on this dichotomy between white and a pictorial memory, in his Under the Snow paintings from 2003-5. In these works the white represents snow, and the images fleeting as they popped through the picture plane randomly, almost like elements in a fairy tale. But we sense the rigors of conceptual art drawn and quartered on the paintings’ surfaces.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac