As luck would have it, Ilya Kabakov was also associated with Greece. Not only because two of his iconic works, The Ship of My Life, are permanently in Athens and the Ship of Tolerance are temporarily in Thessaloniki, but also because they are somehow identified with his life and death. “The ship is the last journey of man, perhaps the end of his life. He stands between earth and sky, between life and death. It carries human existence, emotions and memories. He floats out of time,” said Emilia Kabakova in Thessaloniki, speaking “K” including about the monumental installation at EMST. Ten days later, she had to say goodbye to her life partner in Long Island, New York.

The great conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov passed away suddenly, quietly, shortly before his 90th birthday. “A man who dreamed of utopia all his life left this world on Saturday, May 27, surrounded by his loved ones,” said the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Foundation, asking instead of flowers to make charitable donations to the Ship of Tolerance. This is his latest installation “Ship of Tolerance”, which has been “traveling” for 18 years and these days installed in the port of Thessaloniki, together with the visual installation “Outstanding line of thought”, in the MOMus Experimental Art Center and “Works on Paper” in gallery “Donopoulos International Fine Arts. Ilya Kabakov even managed to admire the “arrival” of the ship in Thessaloniki from afar. His advanced age prevented him from being on Welcome. But Emilia Kabakov’s wife was there to raise his sails, drawn by the students of our country, on the ship-project of the couple’s life, with which they dreamed of an ideal world for all the children of the world.

Born in Soviet Ukraine in 1933, Ilya Kabakov studied at the Moscow Art Academy named after V. A. Surikov, where he began his career as an illustrator of children’s books in the 1950s. Soviet regime- Art and the protagonist of the Moscow Conceptual School himself. In 1985 he held his first solo exhibition in Paris, two years later he left the Soviet Union for the West, lived in Austria, and in 1987 settled in New York.

Throughout his life, Ilya Kabakov, thanks to his extensive work, as well as the joint work that he has done with his wife Emilia since the late 80s, “continued to tell stories in which imagination constantly penetrated into reality,” notes MOMus. From the beautiful graphic series “Characters” to the creation of “ultimate installations” of powerful poetic and symbolic power, he constantly spoke about the themes of utopia, at the same time combining “irony, humor and tragedy”, as Emilia said. “K” Kabakov (K, 05/19/2023). In his work, internationally recognized with awards, distinctions and awards, the conceptual artist, delving into human fears, insecurities and dreams, recalls the stories and concepts of personal and collective memory that emphasize their universal dimension.

A representative project is the “Boat of my life”, which EMST managed to acquire. The installation, a 17-meter wooden ship loaded with crates, objects, photographs and texts, was purchased in 2001. It is considered one of the most expensive works in the collection and, according to art historians, “a rare museum piece”. His “ship of life”, along with other works in the permanent collection, may have been temporarily (03/01/2023) removed from the fourth floor of EMST. But now he floats outside of time, in an unknown world, perhaps in the utopia he dreamed of.