The exhibition has been arranged by State Hermitage in cooperation with Solomon Р. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Stella Art Foundation, Moscow. It contains several installations incorporating more than 80 drawings, 16 paintings, some studies and sketches, models and photographs from various museums and private collections, accompanied by the artist’s comments.
Stella Art’s involvement in setting up an exhibition by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov became a starting point of yet another major area of its activity. As from June 2004, the Foundation is starting a cooperation project with young and mid-career Russian artists. Although contemporary Russia boasts some superb artists, so far the West has not been sufficiently aware of the modern Russian art. Popularization of the work of talented Russian artists in the West is planned to become one more direction of the Foundation’s development strategy. On the other hand, the cultural, ideological and political chasm between the West and the East that existed for several decades of the Cold War, can still be felt today. Our objective is to come to a point where the Western and the Russian contemporary art become inseparable in the minds of people, all the more so that in reality it has already become an uncontested fact. The ecumenical and universal status of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the artists whose oeuvre belongs to the whole world, is an excellent example of how a true talent can overcome boundaries between countries, nations and individual people.
