Construction of a Cupola, Between Heaven and Earth, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Oakville Galleries, Centennial Square, 120 Navy Street, Oakville, Halton, ON
Excerpt from the plaque:
Construction of a Cupola
In late 2020, I started the painting “Construction of a Cupola.” As in every cupola structure, its construction goes in concentric circles that diminish as they get to the center. At the same time, we can imagine rays going from that center to the foundations of the cupola. The intersections of these rays and concentric circles form a grid and the surface of the cupola will consist of segments that gradually diminish as they approach the center.
So, in pondering my conception I prepared to make these segments one after the other, coming up with subjects for each, assuming that when I had finished them, they would fill the entire surface of my cupola (its half) and simultaneously the entire painting.
I drew all the large segments on the edges of the painting and, following my sketches, began moving confidently to its center, filling in several smaller segments. And here I was ambushed by something strange and unexpected.
The point is that the planned painting was rather large (229x862 cm) and consisted of five separate canvases which would be put together for the final painting. I made each of the canvases separately, without completing them in full, but just marking in different places the diminishing segments on each canvas.
When I set all of them next to one another against the wall, just to see “how the work was going” and how much more needed to be done to fill in all the segments and thus complete the entire painting, I unexpectedly saw that the painting was “done” and that nothing more needed to be done!
What had happened?
Before executing all the segments, I had drawn thin yellow lines of the grid that I mentioned earlier and in which I had already completed the greater number of segments. So, when I put it all together, the white and the drawn segments formed a strange but convincing unity that led to the unexpected completion of the painting. The white, undrawn segments in that grid next to the “drawn” ones gained from that proximity a special, mysterious meaning that allowed them to take a “legal” place and not simply be unfinished “holes” on the surface; they had become natural participants of the entire artistic whole.
What was that meaning?
In the article “Finished/Unfinished,” I mentioned and examined the hypothesis that next to the “obvious,” real world there is something that we will never see and that in a symbolic, artistic image can be presented as being “white,” empty, incomplete. And now placed next to each other, “depicted” and empty, in the grid system, where they were the same size, their proximity formed that strange completeness, that unity that we can sense only intuitively.
Construction of a Cupola, Between Heaven and Earth, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Oakville Galleries, Centennial Square, 120 Navy Street, Oakville, Halton, ON
Excerpt from the plaque:
Construction of a Cupola
In late 2020, I started the painting “Construction of a Cupola.” As in every cupola structure, its construction goes in concentric circles that diminish as they get to the center. At the same time, we can imagine rays going from that center to the foundations of the cupola. The intersections of these rays and concentric circles form a grid and the surface of the cupola will consist of segments that gradually diminish as they approach the center.
So, in pondering my conception I prepared to make these segments one after the other, coming up with subjects for each, assuming that when I had finished them, they would fill the entire surface of my cupola (its half) and simultaneously the entire painting.
I drew all the large segments on the edges of the painting and, following my sketches, began moving confidently to its center, filling in several smaller segments. And here I was ambushed by something strange and unexpected.
The point is that the planned painting was rather large (229x862 cm) and consisted of five separate canvases which would be put together for the final painting. I made each of the canvases separately, without completing them in full, but just marking in different places the diminishing segments on each canvas.
When I set all of them next to one another against the wall, just to see “how the work was going” and how much more needed to be done to fill in all the segments and thus complete the entire painting, I unexpectedly saw that the painting was “done” and that nothing more needed to be done!
What had happened?
Before executing all the segments, I had drawn thin yellow lines of the grid that I mentioned earlier and in which I had already completed the greater number of segments. So, when I put it all together, the white and the drawn segments formed a strange but convincing unity that led to the unexpected completion of the painting. The white, undrawn segments in that grid next to the “drawn” ones gained from that proximity a special, mysterious meaning that allowed them to take a “legal” place and not simply be unfinished “holes” on the surface; they had become natural participants of the entire artistic whole.
What was that meaning?
In the article “Finished/Unfinished,” I mentioned and examined the hypothesis that next to the “obvious,” real world there is something that we will never see and that in a symbolic, artistic image can be presented as being “white,” empty, incomplete. And now placed next to each other, “depicted” and empty, in the grid system, where they were the same size, their proximity formed that strange completeness, that unity that we can sense only intuitively.