Prokhorov Finances Russian Postwar Art Show
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Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov is to give $2 million to finance Russia’s first retrospective of artworks by its leading postwar artist, Ilya Kabakov, the metal tycoon’s foundation said today.
New York-based Mr. Kabakov, 74, is a founder of the Moscow Conceptualist art movement that developed in the Soviet Union even as the government repressed nonofficial art. In 1989, Mr. Kabakov began collaborating with his wife, Emilia.
The Moscow show opens September 15 at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and runs simultaneously until October 15 at three other locations, including a renovated 1920s bus depot built by one of Russia’s foremost Modernist architects, Konstantin Melnikov.
The show features more than 150 paintings, drawings, and objects, said Emilia Kabakov. At the end of February, Mr. Kabakov became Russia’s most expensive postwar artist when Phillips de Pury & Co. in London sold his painting “Beetle” (1982) for $5.84 million, on a top estimate of $3.62 million.
