The glare is almost blinding as the midday sun bounces off the snow, packed thick on the ground. Deer tracks make a delicate outline around the large, shingled house, which sits on a cliff on Long Island’s North Fork. Inside, lunch is waiting and Ilya Kabakov pads into the kitchen from his studio in paintspattered clothes. He and his wife Emilia eat, sleep and wake according to a strict schedule. “It’s a very organised household,” Emilia says as she dishes up a beef and vegetable soup. “It’s much easier to work this way.”

This extensive exhibition of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s work will explore the theme of failed utopia. Taking its cue from the title of Ilya Kabakov’s text Not Everyone Will be Taken into the Future, the exhibition will present Ilya Kabakov’s paintings, drawings, and albums made in Moscow from the 1950s to the 1980s before he emigrated to the United States. The exhibition will also show the ‘total’ installations made in collaboration with Emilia from 1989 to the present, which evoke the history and visual culture of the Soviet Union.

The husband-and-wife team is now receiving widespread recognition and acclaim, thanks to an exhibition at Pace Gallery and a documentary at Film Forum.
It is turning out to be a banner year for Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, perhaps Russia’s best-known living artists. Although superstars overseas—commanding multimillion-dollar prices for their canvases, sculptures, and installations—the conceptualist pair is less known in the U.S., despite having spent the past two decades on Manhattan and Long Island.

“Not everyone will be taken into the future”, reads the LED sign on the vanishing metro. Even as visitors step into the gallery they find themselves stranded on an empty platform watching the train as it draws away from them, disappearing through the tunnel of a gallery wall. A few discarded paintings are left, tumbled, on the tracks behind it; abandoned, along with you, are old plastic sheeting and a cheese grater.

Russia’s best-known contemporary artists are American citizens who haven’t lived in the motherland since the Eighties. Yet just about everything in their first major British exhibition (he’s84, she’s 72) refers back to the old Soviet Union: large conceptual paintings based on bureaucratic paperwork, painted mash-ups of socialist realism and the Old Masters, large-scale “total” installations in which old-school Soviet collective apartments become places of simultaneous bleakness and wonder.

The Kabakovs are amongst the most celebrated artists of their generation, widely known for their large-scale installations and use of fictional personas. Critiquing the conventions of art history and drawing upon the visual culture of the former Soviet Union – from dreary communal apartments to propaganda art and its highly optimistic depictions of Soviet life – their work addresses universal ideas of utopia and fantasy; hope and fear.

Kabakov’s installation “The Great Axis” (1984) includes a monumental painting showing a narrow feathery band of green along the bottom and a similar band of blue along the top, with a flat expanse of white paint in between; a thin black line runs diagonally across it, its opposing ends marked with the words “sky” and “earth.” A text panel explains that “The Great Axis” links the sky with the earth; if one fastens the end of the axis on earth, he’ll be able to move the sky, and vice versa. Nearby, Kabakov’s drawings feature short fragments of text rendered in watercolor and ink; reading them is like listening to a discordant chorus of many voices forming the imaginary audience of “The Great Axis.” Some sound curious, others perplexed or hostile, yet others completely indifferent: “Why do they need the labels? It’s all clear as it is”