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Ilya Kabakov (Ukraine 1933) and his wife Emilia (Ukraine 1945) live and work in Long Island (New York, United States). Works by the artists are held in the permanent collections of various prestigious museums, including the MoMA in New York, the London Tate and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and have been shown, among other places, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. In 1992 they participated in Documenta IX at Kassel (Germany), in 1993 they represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale, and in 1997 at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Kabakovs have also done numerous important public commissions all over Europe, and have received many awards and prizes, including the Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo in 2008, the Oskar Kokoschka Preis in Vienna in 2002 and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in Paris in 1995. In 2004 they became the first living Russian artists to have their work shown at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. In 2012 the Sprengel Museum in Hanover mounted a major retrospective of their work, in 2014 they showed at the Grand Palais for Monumenta, and in 2015 they took part in the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale in Niigata (Japan), where The Arch of Life became a permanent work. A solo show by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov opens at the Tate Modern in London in October 2016.
The colour white has particular significance for the Kabakovs: on the one hand it symbolizes a great, infinite void, nothingness, as conceived by Suprematism; on the other, it indicates something transcendent, perhaps even mystical and religious. The abstract, empty surface, framed by human events, refers to the role of collective oblivion, but also to the painting of icons, where the edge preciously frames the sacred image, to which it is inextricably linked. White contains all the colours and reflects light more than any other one, which is why it is the brightest. White frames and marks out the series of oil on canvas paintings presented in this show.
Rounding off the exhibition is The Arch of Life. The work comprises five sculptures representing the different phases of human existence: a head hatching from an egg; a four-legged person wearing a threatening lion mask; a person carrying on their shoulders a box that emits light; a person who is blocked, unable to get over a wall; and finally, someone worn out by an unbearable weight. .