(born Dnjepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1933; lives and works in New York) “The Apartment Battle # 1” (from the series of 6 works), on the reverse signed, dated I. Kabakov 2000, oil, enamel on wood, 64 x 102 cm, framed together with fabric, paper, glass, nails and mounted on white wooden board, overall dimensions 126 x 130 cm, artist’s frame, (PS)

Provenance: The artist
Private Collection – North Rhine Westphalia

The work is registered in the archive under the number 400.

Literature:
Renate Petzinger and Emilia Kabakov (ed.), Ilya Kabakov, Paintings/Gemälde 1957–2008 Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Museum Wiesbaden, published by Kerber, 2008, page 92, no.374

The Apartment War #1 installation tells of a battle against flies that had made themselves at home in a communal Russian flat. The flies were hunted down and killed by all the apartment’s inhabitants, their joint battle against a shared enemy sudden leading to harmonic cohabitation. The room belonging to an old, single woman remained closed. As the leader of the fly hunters sticks his head behind her door a fly comes to rest on his nose. He was about to eliminate it when he realised that this was the old woman’s only friend, who she cared for and protected. The light blue fabric bag symbolises a sack of sugar, hung by the window in the room to feed the flies.
At the top of the painting, the main focus of the installation, in the left and right-hand corners, is written in a calligraphic clerical script: Ivan Ilyich Suchanov: To whom does the fly belong? Eva Israilovna Sech: I don’t know. The fly, the protagonist of the battle in the apartment, is depicted in the centre set against the blue background. “Although matt, as the image background is clearly a dark blue colour, we can conclude that it is intended to represent the sky and that the fly is flying in this deep blue space.” The two inscribed tablets on the upper left and right of the painting “are reminiscent of representations of heavenly bodies in Middle Age engravings.” (from the above literature, Vol. I, p.216)