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‘She had no clue about art': How Dasha Zhukova went from oligarch's wife to saviour of culture
She's been a Russian immigrant to the US, the wife of an oligarch and the wife of a shipping magnate, an It Girl, a magazine editor and a patron of the arts. But Dasha Zhukova's new role is rather surprising: building affordable housing.
The former wife of Roman Abramovich has set up a company called Ray, an ambitious live-work venture which aims to combine art exhibition space, artists' studios and affordable living space. The first projects recently opened in Philadelphia and Harlem, with a new home for the National Black Theatre. And there are further developments in the pipeline for Phoenix and Nashville.
Presumably the Moscow-born, Los Angeles-raised 44-year-old was looking for something to keep herself busy after the closure of her Moscow-based gallery Garage in 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Two days after Putin's forces marched into Ukraine, Zhukova paused all exhibits, to protest what she described on Instagram as 'the brutal and horrific invasion'.
But while she's emphatically condemned Russia's actions, she's been remarkably tight-lipped about her ex-husband's links to Putin. And since she separated from the former owner of Chelsea FC in 2016, Dasha has appeared to distance herself from him. She now has three children with her second husband Stavros Niarchos, a Greek shipping magnate whose late father had a fortune of £12 billion. Well, she certainly has a type.
'The idea that she has nothing to do with Roman any more is far-fetched,' says Elisabeth Schimpfössl, an associate professor of sociology and policy at Aston University, and author of the book Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie. 'They have two children together, she received nearly $100 million in New York real estate from him in the divorce settlement. But she's rearranged her assets and remarried.'
When she first arrived on the scene, Zhukova seemed to fit the cliché of the billionaire's wife merely dabbling in art and philanthropy as a hobby. But she has been able to turn herself into a respected force in the art world.
'At the beginning she had no clue about art,' says an art world insider who met with Dasha in her early days of collecting. 'She had a very scattergun approach and didn't know what she was doing, she seemed a bit clueless. But once she got into international contemporary art she'd clearly found her passion and was very driven.'
During their time together Abramovich amassed one of the world's biggest private art collections, worth an estimated $963 million, including Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, Paula Rego's The Policeman's Daughter and David Hockney 's Beverly Hills Housewife.
'That was all Dasha's doing,' says Mark Hollingsworth, author of Londongrad: from Russia with Cash. 'Abramovich had zero interest in art. They were known for throwing parties in London, New York and St. Barth's, the Caribbean island where Abramovich owns a sprawling mansion and docked his $700 million yacht, Eclipse, at the harbour. He spent most of his time jet skiing. Dasha wasn't your typical socialite, she was very serious, not flakey. She had a lot of celebrity friends and was quite understated considering her position and wealth. She's glamorous, but not by Russian standards. She's not bling.'
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Zhukova counts Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow and the model Karlie Kloss among her close friends. Guests at her and Abramovich's legendary New Year's Eve parties (which reportedly cost £5 million a pop) included Beyoncé, Demi Moore, Orlando Bloom and Kanye West.
'There's something of the diligent school girl about her,' says a New York socialite who attended one of Dasha's parties. 'She speaks perfect English with a hint of a Russian intonation and a Californian lilt. She's very beautiful and interested in people and sociable. Roman was always different – quiet and in the background, no one was surprised when they split up.'
'When I first met her, I thought she was very curious, very quick, and she doesn't forget things,' says Klaus Biesenbach, formerly curator-at-large of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 'It's a good combination: If you ask, you learn, and if you remember, you can make something out of it.'
Daria 'Dasha' Zhukova was born in Moscow in 1981, the only child of molecular biologist Elena and Alexander Zhukov, a businessman who began selling personal computers in Russia in the 1980s before making his fortune in oil in Ukraine. In 2001, he spent several months under arrest on suspicion of being engaged in arms smuggling from Ukraine to the states of former Yugoslavia.
Her parents divorced when Dasha was three years old and in 1991, she moved with her mother to Houston, USA.
'When the Soviet Union collapsed, my mother found it very difficult to be in this quite aggressive environment and she couldn't really handle the abrupt changes,' Zhukova said in a rare interview. 'So we didn't actually emigrate to America, we thought we were just going for a year or two and then, I guess, she decided to stay. You know, I can't imagine what it takes to get up in your 30s, with a child, and say, 'OK, now I'm leaving and going somewhere I don't know.''
After their time in Houston, Elena was offered a teaching position at UCLA and enrolled her daughter in Pacific Hills, a small, sporty private school in West Hollywood whose alumni include the actor Jason Bateman and Monica Lewinsky. Although she tried her hand at modelling, a teenage Dasha preferred volleyball. After high school, she enrolled at UC Santa Barbara, where she took up Slavic studies and literature.
It was this time in the US which allowed the Russian heiress to later seamlessly slip into American high society. As her friend, the writer Derek Blasberg, put it: 'How many 'oligarch's wives' worked at Mrs. Fields Cookies in the mall?' He has also called her 'incredibly hands-on' with her business projects.
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'Because Dasha was from a wealthy background and had grown up in America she immediately set herself apart from other oligarch's wives,' says Elisabeth Schimpfössl. 'She is a quick learner and she knows all the right people. The word I've heard used about her is 'enchanting' – she puts a spell on people.'
At 22, she moved to London to study homeopathic medicine but became obsessed with contemporary art instead, never finishing her course. 'If something captures my attention, I am completely absorbed,' she has said. 'I am very determined; I tunnel-vision straight to where I need to go. I guess that's the thing I really know how to do.'
She lived in one of her father's luxurious apartments in Knightsbridge and dated Marat Safin, a Russian tennis player. In 2005, Dasha met Abramovich at a dinner in Moscow – a friend of her father's from his oil-trading days.
The couple had very different upbringings – Abramovich was born into a poor Jewish family and orphaned at the age of four. Yet when Zhukova met him in 2005, his wealth was estimated at $10 billion, after he bought an oil company from the Russian government in an allegedly rigged auction in 1995. Abramovich's lawyers denied that there was any criminality involved.
But Dasha wasn't going to be content with a life of spas, parties and shopping. She launched a fashion label, Kova & T, and briefly edited the style and music magazine called Pop. With art dealer Larry Gagosian as her mentor (the couple bought a property across the road from him in New York) she became a powerful player in the modern art world.
In 2008, she and Abramovich set up the Garage Contemporary Art Museum. For the 2008 opening, Zhukova, then 27, installed Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Spiral – an enormous light sculpture that blinks in sync with the heartbeat of each viewer – in an abandoned 1920s bus depot and hired Amy Winehouse as post-dinner entertainment.
She founded Garage Magazine, a glossy fashion and art journal, which she sold to Vice Media in 2016. The first issue, in 2011, had a model sporting a Damien Hirst butterfly tattoo on her vulva, and was banned by WH Smith.
She was appointed to the boards of the Metropolitan Museum, the Shed and the Los Angeles County Museum and uses her connections to throw lavish parties for the institutions she's involved with. For LACMA's 30th-anniversary gala, she helped bring the Bolshoi Ballet from Moscow to Los Angeles to dance for Lady Gaga as she played on a Damien Hirst-designed piano while wearing a custom-made Prada chandelier dress.
After Dasha's split from Abramovich – which her spokesperson describes as amicable – she married Stavros Niarchos in a celebrity-packed 2020 wedding in St. Moritz. Guests included Princess Beatrice and art dealer Vito Schnabel. They have three children together and Dasha regularly posts pictures of the family on Instagram – posing at luxury hotels, art exhibitions and attending this year's Met Gala. In 2024, her mother, Elena, married the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
With Dasha's real-estate venture, Ray, she says she is aiming to bring art to everyday life. At least for those who can afford it. At Ray Harlem, which Zhukova says reached its first month's target for new tenants in the first two weeks, the apartments range from $2,700 per month for a studio to $4,800 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, which would be out of the price range of most New York artists.
But presumably like everything else she tries, Dasha will make it more than a vanity project and achieve commercial success. 'I don't know what drives me,' she told an interviewer in 2012. 'But I wake up in the morning and I want to participate in the creative cultural conversation.'
