(born Dnjepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1933; lives and works in New York)
Girl with a Scale, 1972, 2002, oil on canvas, 138 x 89 cm, in Cyrillic script signed, dated and titled Ilya Kabakov 2002 on the reverse, framed, (PS)

Provenance:
The artist
Galerie Michael Kewenig, Cologne
Collection Tom and Yvette Moeskops, The Netherlands

The work is registered in the archive under the work number 371.

Literature:
Renate Petzinger and Emilia Kabakov (Eds.), Ilya Kabakov, Paintings/Gemälde 1957–2008, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Museum Wiesbaden, published by Kerber, 2008, p.134, no. 414.
Exhibition catalogue Ilya/ Emilia Kabakov, An alternative history of art, Rosenthal, Kabakov, Spivak, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Bielefeld 2005, p.166 (colour ill.)

Exhibited / exhibition catalogue:
Cleveland Ott. Museum of Contemporary Art, The teacher and the student, Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov, curated by Jill Synder, director of the Moca Cleveland, 10.9.2004 – 2.1.2005
The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Center for Contemporary Culture Garage, Winzavod Moskau Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Retrospective, 15.9.-18.10.2008, organized by the Ministry of Culture and Cinematography and the Moscow Biennale Foundation (3 catalogues)

The Girl with a Scale is part of the large installation which Ilya Kabakov first exhibited in 2004 under the title “The Teacher and his Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland.
The political situation in 1970s Russia forced many artists to enter a dialectic relationship between themselves and the outside world. Kabakov handles the dilemma of dialectic in his exhibition “The Teacher and his Student” by creating an alter ego, Charles Rosenthal, and setting his work in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. The works he signed as Kabakov were executed between 1970 and 1975. The series should be understood as paraphrasing Rosenthal’s work which Kabakov saw in the “original”, and might have been titled, “If Rosenthal had lived in Russia during the 1970s...”. “The white backgrounds behind the new reality of the 1920s can be interpreted as a space of the ‘bright future’, a space of ‘hope’ that not only Rosenthal, but also many European intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century, hoped to see in the post-revolutionary period. Kabakov belonged to another generation, one that had grown up in the USSR, a generation that had no more ‘bright hopes’, neither in the present nor even more so, in the future. Consequently he exchanges the white space behind Rosenthal’s paintings for a dark, murky gloom. Something is going on in this space, it is rustling about; there is some kind of infinite, unfathomable chaos living beyond the fine film of visible reality and attempts to hide what might be seen behind it, and the viewer is left with the impression of a kind of balancing between these two things (thereof. p. 162).

” Kabakov allows us, the observer, to see only a small detail, the edges covered by dark beams with coloured elements, geometrical derivatives of which also appear within the painting. Kabakov offers the observer a view as if looking out from a window in a dark room into the glittering sunlight, illuminating scenes of rural life in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. The intellect and the Communist collective are contrasted through the medium of light, coming together in the Girl with a Scale.
(Exhibition catalogue. Ilya/ Emilia Kabakov, An alternative history of art, Rosenthal, Kabakov, Spivak, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Bielefeld 2005, p. 147 ff)

additional picture:
exhibition catalogue: Ilya/ Emilia Kabakov, Bielefeld 2005