Ilya Kabakov is a Russian conceptual painter.

His art owes a great deal to Marcel Duchamp, who was the first to discover that art is not necessarily based on a plastic medium, but can be inspired by an idea. An insolent idea, a disembodied thought that gives birth to objects. Marcel Duchamp had decided that the idea, the 'cosa mentale' became the work of art. The attempt to organise aesthetics or the representation of beauty through painting was no longer of interest, since all that was needed to elevate an object to the concept of a work of art was to elect it and give it the universe of the senses. The extension of this theorem gave rise to conceptual art. Kabakov, for his part, used illustration and language to give form to the concept of a world dominated by the absurd. Ilya Kabakov is a painter of the absurd. His Kafkaesque art draws on images from everyday life. An emblematic art of the highest order, it may, like Mallarmé's words, seem hermetic, but it is not. Ilya Kabakov's thinking is above all human. He is a good man, and his characters stay in the corners because, possessed by ancestral Russian fear, they are afraid to come to the centre of the paper. His work, like its creator, is rich in paradox and irony. Kabakov invents a world revisited and rethought through painting freed from the conventions of representation. But unlike other formalist artists, who have exhausted the genre by steering contemporary painting towards an icy intellectualism, Kabakov links his intellectual approach to a warm plastic expression of high quality and rigorous relevance. In a century in which painting has become a discourse, Kabakov's fresh eloquence goes straight to the heart. Although known throughout the world, Kabakov rarely exhibited in Moscow. His isolation led him to create ever larger works and formats whose dimensions would have no other destiny than the calm of museums or the silence of the studio.

This first solo exhibition in Paris allows us to gauge the importance of his work and compare him with the greatest contemporary artists.

- Dina Vierny