Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023) was born in Dnipropetrovsk, in what is now Ukraine, and spent his childhood in conditions of considerable hardship, including evacuation to Samarkand during the Second World War. He showed early artistic aptitude and attended the school of the Leningrad Academy of Art while in Samarkand before moving to Moscow at eighteen to study at the Surikov Art Institute, from which he graduated with a specialty in graphic design and book illustration. He joined the Union of Soviet Artists in 1959 and for three decades supported himself by illustrating children's books for Soviet publishers—work he performed for several months each year while devoting the rest of his time to private artistic projects that could not be shown publicly.

From the 1960s onward, Kabakov was the central figure in a loose network of Moscow artists and intellectuals who developed a practice now known as Moscow Conceptualism. Working in conditions of official censorship and operating outside the official Soviet cultural apparatus, Kabakov and his colleagues produced works that engaged critically and ironically with the visual and rhetorical language of Soviet institutional life—the communal apartment, the official notice, the bureaucratic document, the ideological slogan. He circulated handmade albums and texts among friends, building a community of shared reference and private meaning within a system that permitted no public dissent.

After emigrating to the West in 1988, Kabakov quickly achieved international recognition, and from that point he worked in close collaboration with his wife Emilia Kabakov, whom he married in 1992. Together they developed what they called the "total installation"—immersive environments that transported viewers into complete fictitious worlds, often drawn from the detritus and memory of Soviet communal existence. Works such as The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment and Ten Characters placed viewers inside constructed rooms that evoked the cramped, monitored, and spiritually constrained life of the Soviet communal apartment with a mixture of documentary detail and poetic melancholy.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's total installations were presented in major museums and biennials worldwide, and their work is held in collections across Europe, North America, and beyond. Ilya Kabakov died in May 2023, leaving a body of work that stands as one of the most sustained and searching artistic responses to the experience of life under a totalitarian system.