A filigree temple snail stands in a huge hall at the Zollverein colliery in Essen as a memorial against pragmatism. Architecturally a mixture of Tatlin’s monument to the revolution and baroque folly, the “Palace of Ideas and Dreams” is conceived as a school for utopia. At the turn of the millennium, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov set up this academy with 61 tables between models, materials and angelic beings as leading figures. Anyone who is exhausted from dogmatism, offended politics, bureaucratic incrustation and the damage caused by egoism should find the peace here to recharge their batteries of ideas.
A 1984 drawing by Kabakov became the prophecy of the Russian invasion
This palace is the essence of the work of the Kabakovs, who have been developing the potential of the Russian avant-garde in New York since fleeing the Soviet state in 1988. Ilya Kabakov, who belonged to an undercover group of conceptual artists in Moscow, first made a splash in the West with enigmatic installations that captured the drab socialist everyday life (as opposed to socialist “realism”). He later combined the iconography of propaganda promises with absurd comedy and a liberating sense of the fantastic. This combination resulted in a rich oeuvre filled with references to intellectual history, which made him one of the most important contemporary artists.
The eternal return of old patterns was always the threatening image of the enemy against which the Kabakovs, born in Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine – who increasingly worked together – developed their seductive and inviting art. A drawing by Kabakov with warships in front of the words “Go Fuck Yourself” from 1984 also became the meme of this return after the Russian invasion because of its prophetic content. Now the tireless visionary of new patterns has died at the age of 89. But his dreams and ideas live on, for example in the Essen palace of a utopian republic.