Anastasia Bukhman, the Russian-born collector behind a £1m donation to London’s National Portrait Gallery

Anastasia Bukhman says that moving to London and studying art history at the Sotheby’s Institute was “like a new world” Photo: @davidowensphoto
The Bukhman Foundation is the hottest new kid on the sponsorship block; it was created very recently by the Russian-born, London-based billionaires Anastasia and Igor Bukhman. Today, the foundation is announcing a gift of £1m to London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG). The gift, which is spread over three years, will fund the purchase of portraits of living people for the NPG. The first two acquisitions are From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis (1987) by Sonia Boyce and Souvenir 17 (Albert Edward, Prince of Wales) (2024) by Hew Locke.
So what is this foundation, and who is the driving force behind it? I sat down with Anastasia Bukhman in her London home to talk about how she started collecting, what she collects, the foundation’s aims and her plans for the future.
The house, a vast white stuccoed building in Kensington, is a far cry from Vologda in northern Russia, where both she and her husband were born and brought up. “There was only a domestic airport there, so to travel abroad you first had to drive for six, seven hours to Moscow or take an overnight train,” she tells me.
The family fortune comes from Igor, 43, and his brother Dimtry, 39, who founded the mobile games developer Playrix while still in Vologda in 2004. It has made them extremely wealthy: according to Forbes, the brothers were worth $18.2bn last year.
And yet there is nothing showy about Anastasia. The mother of four children, she is small, lively and very simply dressed in jeans and a sweater: she speaks fluently and rapidly in excellent English.
“We left Russia in 2014 because my husband just never felt safe, he just didn’t feel confident under the regime,” she says. The family initially moved to Dublin—“It was magical, so green, clean and safe, and you could travel so easily from there” —and then to Israel before moving to London five years ago. Dmitry and his family are also in London, and the company cut its last ties with Russia in October 2022, shutting its offices and relocating hundreds of staff as a result of the invasion of Ukraine.
Hew Locke’s Souvenir 17 (Albert Edward, Prince of Wales) (2024) from his Souvenir series, begun in 2018, of reimagined busts of establishment figures, is one of the foundation’s acquisitions for the National Portrait Gallery Photo: courtesy of the artist, Hales London and New York; © Hew Locke, all rights reserved, DACS 2025
It was towards the end of the Dublin stay that Anastasia started really taking an interest in art. “In Russia, where I came from, there weren’t any art lessons—no museums. So I didn’t know anything about art until we were in Europe and I started going to the Prado [in Madrid], the Centre Pompidou [in Paris] and so on.”
When the family moved to London, Anastasia took a history of art course at the Sotheby’s Institute: “For me it was like a new world, I loved it! And the part which really changed my approach was about conceptual art. It has a message, it intrigues me because it is like history in the making.”
Interestingly, at the beginning she was unaware of the market and the very notion of buying art was alien to her: “I didn't think you could buy art. And when I did start buying, I initially didn’t see myself as a collector. But now I definitely have criteria, I collect the contemporary art of my time: young, emerging artists.”
That said, she also has work by established artists; she cites Félix Gonzáles Torres, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley, Cecily Brown, Gerhard Richter, Sam Gilliam, Louise Bourgeois, Urs Fischer, Simone Leigh as well as Antony Gormley, George Condo, Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, Miriam Cahn, Tracey Emin, Joseph Kosuth and Louise Nevelson as being in her collection.
“When I think about the work by established artists, I think, ‘how does it speak to the emerging artists I have?’ I do have a list of artists I'm looking for, but it is always about that connection.” Among the younger names she has already acquired are Daisy Parris, Florian Krewer, Somaya Critchlow and Ro Robertson. While initially focused on painting, she is now also interested in sculpture.
Sonia Boyce’s 1987 work From Someone Else's Fear Fantasy (A Case of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis is one of the first works the Bukhman Foundation has donated to the National Portrait Gallery Photo: Tim Bowditch; © Sonia Boyce, all rights reserved, DACS 2025
I ask her about how she came to support institutions such as the South London Gallery, where the foundation funds its Art Block programme, and now the NPG. “At the beginning I didn’t know anyone in arts institutions,” Bukhman says. “Then I was introduced Margot Heller from South London Gallery. She explained how it all worked, I was fascinated; until then I had imagined that governments supported institutions: the notion of philanthropy was not in our experience, not in our circle of friends.” And she adds with genuine modesty: “Initially I thought they wouldn’t be interested in us supporting them. I felt as if we are not the right people, I was quite amazed that we could support an exhibition by an artist.”
She and her husband have recently established the Bukhman Foundation, with three aims: first, to fund medical research into type 1 diabetes (which her eldest daughter has); second, an education focus, with a hardship fund to make bursaries available to children who wouldn’t otherwise be able to continue their education; and finally, support for art and culture. She says the foundation will be making grants in the nine figures over the coming years, without being more precise.
While Anastasia seems poised and calm, she has a whirlwind of a life, between her family, the foundation and an exciting new project in Venice. But as she says modestly: “I see myself as a wife, a mother, a philanthropist, and yes, I do collect art as well!”
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