Deweer Art Gallery presents a series of new paintings and drawings by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, entitled The Thaw (2004-2006). This is not Ilya Kabakovs first show at Deweer Art Gallery. Already in 1992 we have presented the installation of the album In Memory of Pleasant Recollections and in 1998 Ilya Kabakov was our guest for the historical double show Jan Fabre & Ilya Kabakov: Een Ontmoeting / Vstrecha / A Meeting. This time we show paintings and drawings which were never shown anywhere else. At the same time, in the upper gallery, we present drawings by Ilya Kabakov together with works by other artists of the Russian avantgarde to which Ilya belonged in his Moscow years, such as Ivan Tchouikov and Vadim Zakharov. Ilya & Emilia Kabakov on their series The Thaw (or Under the Snow): (translated from Russian by Cynthia Martin) 'The series Under the Snow (2004-2006), consisting of 23 paintings, also has two other titles: Beyond the Clouds and The Thaw. Its concept is based on the idea of the depiction of a soft, bright, white medium with fragments of real or not real, but in any case recognizable, reality breaking through it. The effect resembles what we see looking out of an airplane window when the earth is visible through breaking through the cloud cover. But the very same earth directly underfoot can appear the same exact way, when it is visible between heaps of snow during a thaw. In any variation, we are talking about unique sorts of 'windows'. Some sort of remnants of the past can be seen through these windows. Either from the actual Soviet past, or from some pre-past that surfaces from depths no longer from one's memory, but rather from one's imagination. An artistic task is also postulated in this work. These 'ruptures' can be interpreted as expressionist, formless spots rushing diagonally across a white background. This series unexpectedly finds an analogy in the old 'white' paintings of 1977-78 ('White covers everything' and others) that were done while I was still in Moscow.'