Viktor Popkov to have first UK exhibition in 2014

Soviet realist artist Viktor Popkov will have his first UK exhibition at London’s Somerset House later this year. The exhibition will comprise around 40 paintings by the artist, including his most famous canvas Summer, July (1969). Billionaire art collector Andrey Filatov set an auction record for Popkov in 2010 when he bought the painting from Sotheby’s in New York for $842,500. Filatov has described Popkov as “the Dostoevsky of art” despite the fact that he is little known outside of Russia.

Popkov was one of the most celebrated artists in the Soviet Union. As an artist, he went through several different stylistic periods from socialist realism in the Fifties, to the austere style he helped create in the Sixties, to a more romantic phase later on. He was accidentally shot and killed in a tragic incident in Moscow in 1974. The exhibition will run at Somerset House from 20 May to 24 June 2014.