My review of The Study of Kabakov exhibition at Edelman Arts for Bomb Magazine:
...In 1965, Ilya Kabakov, officially a children’s book illustrator, gained intense notoriety when his Shower series was exhibited with other Soviet unofficial artists by a Communist organization in Italy. The series depicts a man standing under a shower head, but the water that comes out of it somehow avoids touching him or lands like snow on top of his head. Western critics claimed the work symbolized the lack of material resources in the Soviet Union, and Kabakov was heralded as the voice of the anti-Soviet generation. But the artist himself explained that it simply depicted an existentialist dilemma, one of a person who is forever waiting. Indeed, in a recent interview with the Daily Beast, the artist’s wife, Emilia Kabakov, put it this way: “If you go looking for political meaning you can always find it. If you don’t, you don’t.”...
