Oakville Galleries presents the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov at both of our gallery locations. The grand opening on Saturday May 31 will feature a concert by young performers, presented in Gairloch Gardens.
Between Heaven and Earth highlights a number of the artists’ works, including paintings, prints and installations, and spills out into the gardens with several larger artworks. The largest installation is The Ship of Tolerance, a 60-foot long, hand-crafted wooden ship with sails made from children’s paintings, presented lakeside in Gairloch Gardens for one year. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, its first appearance in Canada takes place at a critical time where a crossroads towards a new global order is visible.
In Oakville, over 2,000 children from local schools and diverse community groups have played a part in creating The Ship of Tolerance project to date. These young participants converse together about inclusivity, different cultures, respect and creative ideas of the future, then they create paintings that express their visions of tolerance and how that shapes our collective future. A selection of the resulting paintings are sewn together to create the sail for the ship, while the remaining paintings are displayed in various locations in Oakville.
Programmed to complement the exhibition and presented adjacent to The Ship of Tolerance, this year’s Sunset Kino festival will run from June to July. Founded by Séamus Kealy in 2017 in Salzburg, Austria, Sunset Kino is Canada’s only outdoor, avant-garde cinema. This year’s theme is WHAT WAS THAT and will include films and programs by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Renèe Helèna Browne, Ala Roushan and others.
Altogether this set of exhibitions, programs and installations is the most ambitious project by Oakville Galleries to date. The Ship of Tolerance is presented in collaboration with the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Foundation, as well as with The National Gallery of Canada. The National Gallery of Canada’s National Engagement initiative is generously supported by Michael Nesbitt, with additional funding from the National Gallery of Canada Foundation.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have long been amongst the most celebrated artists of their generation, widely known as pioneers of installation art. Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro) in Ukraine, formerly part of the Soviet Union. When he was eight, he moved to Moscow with his mother. He studied at the Art School of Moscow, and at the V.I. Surikov Art Institute. Artists in the Soviet Union were obliged to follow the officially approved style, Socialist Realism. Wanting to retain his independence, Ilya supported himself as a children’s book illustrator from 1955 to 1987, while continuing to make his own paintings and drawings. As an ‘unofficial artist’, he worked in the privacy of his Moscow attic studio, showing his art only to a close circle of artists and intellectuals and becoming the leader of the Moscow Conceptualist movement.
Ilya was not permitted to travel outside the Soviet Union until 1987, when he was offered a fellowship at the Grazer Kunstverein, Austria. The following year he visited New York, and resumed contact with Emilia Lekach. Born in 1945, Emilia trained as a classical pianist at Music College in Irkutsk, and studied Spanish Language and Literature at Moscow University before leaving the USSR in 1973. Ilya and Emilia began their artistic partnership in the late 1980s, and were married in 1992. Together, they have produced a prolific output of total installations and other conceptual works addressing ideas of utopia, dreams, and fear, all reflective of the universal human condition. Their work has been exhibited world-wide in leading museums and biennials. ArtNews Magazine listed the Kabakovs amongst the ten most important living artists in the world.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have collaborated together since 1988. Sadly, Ilya passed away in May of 2023. Emilia continues realizing their projects into the future.
ARTHOUSE
Derry West Village Public School
EJ James Public School
Joshua Creek Public School
Kenollie Public School
Maple Grove Public School
McKinnon Public School
Meadowvale Village Public School
River Oaks Public School
St. Andrew Catholic Elementary School
St. Cecilia Catholic Elementary School
St Edith Stein Elementary School
St. Marguerite d’Youville Catholic Elementary School
WH Morden Public School
Tuesday – Saturday:
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Monday (by appointment)
Closed Sunday + statutory holidays
Free Admission
