Oleg Prokofiev’s Lost Trove of Paintings Comes to Light After Decades in Hiding

Love can be an extremely powerful motivator. For more than a decade beginning in the mid-1950s, the Russian artist Oleg Prokofiev hid his abstract works in the hope of receiving permission from the state to marry. His impediments were two-fold: abstract art was banned in the Soviet Union and the target of his affections, Camilla Gray, was British and it was generally verboten for Russians to marry non-Soviet citizens.

In 1969, the state acquiesced, but two years later Gray died and shortly thereafter Prokofiev moved to England, leaving behind his trove of artworks. As it turned out, his color-filled geometric paintings were in safe hands, for when he returned to Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he found them perfectly intact.

These works, together with recovered sculptures, sketchbooks, letters, postcards, are now on display for the first time at the newly founded Prokofiev Studio in Hackney, London. The space has been established by Prokofiev’s four children, including the contemporary classical composer Gabriel Prokofiev, alongside the curator Anzhela Popova, in the hope of reviving the artist’s legacy and showcasing emerging talent.

At the center of “Bending Time,” the gallery’s inaugural group show, is a reconstruction of Prokofiev’s studio from the 1990s, which was a couple of miles away in Hackney Wick. The works include Prokofiev’s twisting wooden sculptures, a focus of his London practice; some dangling from the ceiling like doodles given flight, others sit on plinths forming pooled, interlocking shapes. Alongside Prokofiev’s late works (he died in 1997), his sketches for such works appear alongside newspaper clippings, notes, and a childhood drawing he made for his parents.

Prokofiev attended the Moscow School of Art in the late 1940s, where he was schooled in the aesthetics of state-endorsed socialist realism. After working in the studio of Robert Falk, a pivotal figure in bridging French Post-Impressionism and the Russian avant-garde, Prokofiev worked at the Institute of Art History in Moscow, where his study of Indian art would push him to explore wood as a sculptural material.

He was the second son of the celebrated 20th century Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev, best known for , and they both enjoyed a cultural milieu in which writers, filmmakers, and artists met up to exchange ideas. Prokofiev Studio hopes to rekindle this cross-disciplinary energy by offering a platform to contemporary artists in visual art, film, music, and literature. In its debut show, Prokofiev’s works are presented alongside the Russian-born abstract artist Kirill Basalaev and London-based multidisciplinary artist Valentino Vannini.