Story of the Wardrobe

A representative of the Moscow Conceptualist school, Igor Makarevich is known for his attention to liminal states—death, decay, and transformation—as well as to objects‑as‑witnesses that preserve traces of loss and oblivion. One of the recurring motifs in Makarevich’s practice is the metaphor of the wardrobe; a vessel of memory, an archival container in which objects acquire a new symbolic dimension. This theme, first conceived in the 1960s after a chance encounter with a “wardrobe‑cabinet” in a Bolshoi Theater studio, has reappeared throughout the artist’s career.

The installation Story of the Wardrobe is a development of the Homo Lignum series (Latin for “wooden man”), begun in 1996. Its central figure is Nikolai Ivanovich Borisov, an accountant at a woodworking factory. In diaries written entirely by Makarevich, Borisov describes a strange obsession: he feels a physiological, psychological, and erotic connection to trees and longs to turn into wood. Consumed by this desire, he invents a system of rituals and mysteries in which the mask of Buratino (Pinocchio) becomes a key attribute. In Homo Lignum, Makarevich explored the transformation of identity: the “little man,” paralyzed by fear of the state and his neighbors, seeks salvation in illusion, turning his obsession into a personal religion.

In 2014, the artist added a new dimension to the project—the trope of the wardrobe. According to legend, Borisov finds it on a trash heap and, enchanted, sets in motion a series of real and phantasmagorical transformations. The title’s reference to Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye and the choice of furniture itself establish the logic of the narrative: the wardrobe ceases to perform its usual function and exists in a chain of metamorphoses—wardrobe‑as‑camera, wardrobe‑as‑urinal, wardrobe‑as‑guillotine, wardrobe‑as‑coffin—linking the erotic and the thanatic. Photographs, drawings, and Borisov’s diary entries reconstruct the inner world of the character, forming a visual labyrinth in which the viewer becomes immersed in an intimate, disturbing, and alluring mythology. Makarevich creates a space of immersion into the marginal and the rejected: beyond the limits of the “norm,” yet exposing the deep mechanisms of culture. In Story of a Wardrobe individual obsession resonates with modernist myths of art as a form of sacred madness.