During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader� of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages. Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism� of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists. This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.

A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country's most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region's contemporary art, culture and and theory. With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

Ilya Kabakov (*1933) is one of the former Soviet Union's most important and influential international artists today. After the two-volume catalogue raisonne of paintings (2008) and 2017's catalogue raisonne of installations, we are now publishing a complete overview of Kabakov's recent paintings. Different ideas, phases, and styles unfold across the 350 works of art, but the artist's inimitable signature can always be recognised. Visual themes include, for example, the colour white, the relationship between complete and incomplete, and the combination of either various styles or of painting and photography. Still, all of the pieces have one thing in common: they all pursue a conceptual approach and make references to art history.