Roman Abramovich's girlfriend Daria Zhukova is champion of modern art

Tony Halpin in Moscow


Roman Abramovich transformed English football when he bought Chelsea — and now his girlfriend is doing the same for modern art in Russia.

Daria Zhukova has opened the largest contemporary art show ever staged in Moscow in an exhibition that she hopes will inspire a wave of Russian creativity.

A Certain State of the World showcases work by 33 contemporary artists from the collection of the French entrepreneur François Pinault. It is being staged at the Garage, a vast former bus depot that Ms Zhukova has transformed into a centre for contemporary culture with the support of Mr Abramovich, 42.

The billionaire has earned thanks as a sponsor of the show, which runs for three months. It is Ms Zhukova, 27, however, who is emerging as a significant patron of modern art in Moscow. “The Moscow public needs, in a way, an introduction to contemporary art and doing a group show is a really great stepping stone,” she said.



A giant skull fashioned from kitchen utensils dominates the entrance to the exhibition. The piece, Very Hungry God, by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta, is reminiscent of the diamond-encrusted skull For the Love of God, by Damien Hirst

The 53 works range from installations and video art to photographs and sculptures. The first section has an array of military tents, one filled with coffins, which Caroline Bourgeois, the curator, described as a commentary on US imperialism and masculine violence.

An ostrich buries its head in the concrete floor and an unsettling robot of a child moves around on a tricycle in the second section, which has five works from Jeff Koons, the American artist.

They include exaggerated models of children’s inflatable toys strung from industrial chains and his Hanging Heart suspended from a golden ribbon. A version of the three-metre sculpture sold at Sotheby’s for $23.6 million (£16.3 million) in 2007, which at the time was a record for a living artist.

Ms Zhukova, who has no formal art training, said that many of the artists had never been seen in Russia before. She regards the Garage as a riposte to the “aggressive stifling of Russian culture” during the Soviet era and it will host the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in September.

Though rich in her own right as the daughter of Aleksandr Zhukov, an oil baron, her cause is undoubtedly helped by her association with Mr Abramovich. Not known as an art lover before he divorced his wife Irina in favour of Ms Zhukova, he caused a sensation by paying record prices at auction for art works, including $26.5 million for a Degas pastel and $120 million in 24 hours in May for Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping and Francis Bacon’s Triptych.

Mr Pinault, who owns the auctioneers Christie’s and the Château Latour vineyard, made his fortune in luxury brands such as Gucci and owns one of the greatest modern art collections in the world.

Ms Zhukova hopes to repeat the success of her first exhibition of works by Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, which she said attracted 60,000 visitors in a month. She has assembled commercial sponsors to support the Garage, where entrance is free.

However, with even Russian oligarchs humbled by the financial crisis, she acknowledged that she had been forced to plan cheaper exhibitions. “The Garage will survive,” she said. “There is a lot of great art that is not as costly to bring to Russia.”



+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
September 13, 2008
How Dasha Zhukova is revolutionising the Russian art world
We know Dasha Zhukova as Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend. But in Moscow, she is revolutionising the Russian art world
James Collard


“What a great space,” someone says as we enter the old Bakhmetevsky bus garage in Moscow. But that scarcely begins to do justice to this unimaginably vast, parallelogram-shaped chamber, built by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov in 1927. Here, for decades, Soviet mechanics toiled and sweated – or perhaps shivered from cold or the fear of denunciation and arrest. But like the USSR, the buses and the workers have gone now, and one night in June, an altogether different group of people gathered to toast the garage’s new role – as a private but non-profit gallery for contemporary art.



It is quite a sight, the international art world en masse and working the room in a kind of slow Brownian motion. There’s a lot to work, given both the dimensions of the room and the fact that this is such a target-rich environment for anyone keen on schmoozing. Some major collectors are here, including cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, hedge-fund boss Steven A. Cohen and Ukrainian oligarch-turned-philanthropist, Victor Pinchuk. There are artists such as Jeff Koons and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose lighting “tree” sculpture is the only artwork in place for the party. Gallerist Larry Gagosian – who opens a commercial gallery in Moscow this month – is here, along with his former lieutenant, Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, now international director of the Garage. And mingling with them all and grazing on canapés are some seriously rich, chic Russians.



For anyone not wowed by all that artiness, the show has also got even the British tabloids’ attention: Amy Winehouse has reportedly been paid £1 million to perform. Will she appear, we all wonder – and will she be late? Out of it? Brilliant? (There was a bit of a wait, it’s true, and whether she was out of it or not was a moot point, but the performance was certainly brilliant.) The tabloids are also interested because our hostess tonight, Daria (Dasha) Zhukova, the 27-year-old Russian It girl who had the bright idea of turning Melnikov’s garage into Russia’s leading contemporary art institution, also happens to be the girlfriend of Roman Abramovich: oligarch, former provincial governor, owner of Chelsea FC and now, since he paid top dollar for a Bacon and a Freud earlier this year, emerging as a new major collector of art.



They make a glamorous couple, everyone agrees. Abramovich – looking dashing and actually rather hot in a tux, rather than the humdrum stuff he wears to the footie. And Zhukova, a real beauty, but clearly also a brainy one, as she inaugurates the project with a speech, first in Russian, then in flawless American-accented English. For the truth is that while it might be tempting to present Zhukova as simply a dazzling young trophy – and she certainly looks dazzling – or even a young gold-digger (and people occasionally have), that amusing narrative is pretty wide of the mark.



She’s wealthy in her own right, for a start, though perhaps not in Abramovich’s league – the daughter of Aleksandr Zhukov, who first made his fortune “in oil”, as she puts it when we meet up in London this month (and not, as has been widely reported, his namesake, the long-serving Russian deputy prime minister). Her mother is a professor of microbiology in California, where Zhukova largely grew up after her parents divorced – thus the accent – and studied literature and Slavic studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For many young Russian women Zhukova represents a different kind of icon from a mere trophy beauty, because she’s savvy and professionally ambitious as well as attractive and chic, rather than bling, like an earlier wave of post-Soviet lovelies. And in common with her good friend Polina Deripaska – not just the wife of an oligarch, but also head of the publishing group FMG – Zhukova has always worked. She launched what she describes as a “small but successful” fashion label, Kova & T, with her old schoolfriend Christina Tang, and while by her own admission, she’s not “some art genius”, she has put all her energies and star power into getting the Garage off the ground.



“I think it’s just part of my personality that I’ve had since I was little,” Zhukova says of her work ethic. “And I’m sure my mother and father helped shape that. But I have a feeling I was born with this itch to do things… and of course I want to try to make them successful – ideas and projects and the realisation of things that I think are cool.” She doesn’t especially enjoy shopping (“I can’t shop for long”), rather seeing money as a tool which “can help you to create, to realise ideas”.

I ask her to describe growing up in LA (where the initial difficulty was “not speaking English at all... that was a bit of a challenge, but I quickly adapted – I think I quickly adapt.”). “Give me an age,” she bounces back at me, and I say 14, an interesting age... “14? I was playing volleyball. And organising. My friends and I loved going to Palm Springs, so we’d organise garage sales and sell off our parents’ things so we could go,” she giggles. “I don’t know why we didn’t just ask. If we’d asked them for money they’d probably have given it to us. But it just seemed to be more fun that way.”



More recently Zhukova asked a number of investors, including Abramovich, to put money into the Garage. Abramovich has also sponsored the opening show of works by the Russian contemporary artist Ilya Kabakov. Zhukova wasted no time in forging new relationships in the art world at the highest levels, recently visiting Damien Hirst in his Gloucester studios, agreeing to co-host the planned Serpentine Gallery party last weekend, and assembling a remarkable group of people to advise her, from Dent-Brocklehurst and Gagosian to a broader, at this stage informal group of art world heavyweights, including the Tate’s Sir Nicholas Serota.

As Zhukova sees it, “There is no other institution in Moscow like this and I think a lot of people are excited to have Russia take a step in this direction. So everyone’s been very supportive, simply because they’re fond of the idea.” There are, she explains, contemporary art galleries, but nothing like the internationally recognised, museum-like institution she hopes the Garage will become. “A lot of people feel that Moscow, with its history... [and] as an up-and-coming cosmopolitan city should definitely have a space like this. That’s been a big help.”



She’s also looking for sponsorship – and given Zhukova’s own cachet in Russia, now arguably the luxury goods industry’s leading market, it’s not hard to imagine some fancy-schmancy brands being only too willing to be associated with such a high-profile project. Interestingly, the second show at the Garage will be of contemporary art from the large collection of luxury goods tycoon François Pinault. “A great show for us,” says Zhukova, “given that many Russians aren’t so familiar with a lot of contemporary art, and his collection includes the best of many different kinds of work.”



Zhukova has had no formal training in art, although she has “always been interested in art – and consequently or coincidentally, so have the people around me, which exposed me to many different types of art and artists. My dad is really into architecture and photography, and both of my best friends are artists.” Just how much Abramovich’s new penchant for collecting art is down to Zhukova’s influence has been eagerly debated – although he began sponsoring exhibits at Somerset House organised by the Moscow House of Photography two years ago, before they were dating. “You’d have to ask him,” Zhukova replies when I ask what got Abramovich collecting. (And indeed, try as I might, their relationship remains off limits; after we spoke I e-mailed a “cheeky question, I know,” about whether the couple plan to marry, and got the pithy response: “Cheeky. N/A. xxx.”)



But it wouldn’t be the first time that a (very) rich man graduated from buying yachts and houses to the infinitely cooler business of acquiring art. Who knows, but given that the oligarchs’ rise wasn’t universally popular in Russia, perhaps the thought of bequeathing a great art collection has some appeal. After all, we remember Henry Clay Frick for his Collection, not for how he made his money. And it wouldn’t be the first time, either, that a man changed his interests along with his partner – Abramovich having divorced his second wife Irina earlier this year.

Certainly Zhukova – born into money, sophisticated, educated and cosmopolitan – represents a new kind of Russian woman, who loves Mexican food and “cheesy romcoms” as well as contemporary art and feels at ease everywhere. As Dasha puts it, “Now I’m in London and I’ve just been in Italy, and I’m here and I’m there, but I’d say Moscow is my place of residence this year... With the Garage opening I’m really living in Moscow.” As Abramovich’s first wife, Olga, told a reporter earlier this year, Zhukova is “one of Russia’s new golden kids who are unbelievably rich, have seen the world and travelled all over the place... Irina and I were brought up at a time when people said, ‘There’s no sex in the Soviet Union.’ Dasha knows there is sex – and she knows how to present herself. I’m not surprised Romka [Roman] has lost himself to her.”

Contrary to some reports, Abramovich – who as well as making the two biggest art purchases of the year, also swept through the Art Basel fair on a shopping trip with Zhukova – looks completely comfortable in an art-world setting, if the Moscow party is anything to go by. But on this, as on all matters Abramovich, Zhukova isn’t to be drawn, saying simply, “I think that’s one of your questions for his interview.”

She does, however, have words of reassurance – “Not a threat, in my opinion, not a threat” – when I tell her that some Chelsea fans are concerned that buying up all this major art might make Abramovich less interested in the beautiful game, and less inclined to drop major dough on buying key players.

Zhukova is equally unforthcoming on the subject of politics, as I discover when I ask how, as a Russian who grew up in America, it must be upsetting to see the growing froideur between two countries she might both call home (not to mention the UK, where until recently she spent most of her time). “I try not to think too much about politics,” she says, which given the accent, sounds pretty Valley Girl, but come to think of it, is probably a sensible course for a Russian in her position, given that the success of the Garage, and possibly that of her relationship, is predicated on not putting Vladimir Putin’s nose out of joint.

“I know what I’m not,” she tells me, “and I’m not a politician. I’m sorry, I don’t care to elaborate on my point of view.” Which brings to mind a moment at the Garage party when a Russian told me a story critical of a member of the Russian Government, but worryingly, looked around first to check no one else was listening before doing so and warned me not to tell anyone. Russia might not be the totalitarian state it was back when the Garage was first built, but it’s not Liberty Hall either.

There’s something disturbing in the ease with which the contemporary art scene – which surely prides itself on its wild, free-form creativity – settles down to doing business in countries like Russia and China. For the art world, there are profits to be made and new opportunities, while for a modern, outward-looking woman like Zhukova, introducing Russians to contemporary art via the Garage and the educational programmes she plans must seem exciting, progressive – and also politically neutral. Perhaps Russians might now almost be hard-wired to tread carefully when it comes to politics – and while Zhukova seems likeable, smart and funny and remarkably down-to-earth, like many of her generation of Russians she seems no more given to questioning the status quo than a Romanov princess might have been.

But does all that It-girl coverage do her head in, I wonder. “Well, I don’t necessarily see myself in that way,” she answers, then laughs. “But maybe I don’t think deeply about it enough to decide whether it’s annoying or not,” which probably isn’t a bad approach for an It girl with a good brain on her. “I don’t set out to be spotlighted and I don’t really go out much to places where there’s high interest. But you know sometimes, people say things that are really hurtful or unfair or untrue a lot of the time. But it is what it is. Everyone is just doing their job and they need to sell papers so they make stuff up. I understand the chain.”

Clearly, among the hurtful might be the suggestion that she is just a dilettante, that as one reporter suggested, some of her vocabulary seems straight out of Clueless, or that she’s not as clued up on art as she could be. “I think that people should judge actions, instead of making assumptions based on a stereotype,” she says.

“I think it is too early for anyone to call me anything. We haven’t even opened the Garage yet. How can anyone have an opinion?” As Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst sees it, “I don’t think anyone who knows her would call her this. She’s hugely energetic and focused. Although she is not an art expert, which she would be the first to admit, she is extremely intelligent and has a naturally good eye and inherent understanding of art.”

Nonetheless, I suggest that a bit of buzz can be useful when it comes to promoting her project. “I think that of course there is a heightened amount of interest,” she agrees, “because of the social aspects of my life. But I try not to use that. I try to promote the project itself.” The kind of hullabaloo the party generates can, she feels, “be a double-edged sword. I think on the one hand people can get excited, and on the other hand they’re thinking, ‘They got Amy, do they really need our sponsorship?’” Or perhaps more to the point, she’s got Roman Abramovich, who presumably could just write one big cheque. But that’s not what Zhukova wants at all. Maybe, like those garage sales back in California, it’s just more fun this way.

The Garage, Center for Contemporary Culture (GCCC), opens in Moscow on Wednesday