Bomb sleight
Artwashing, Issue 1639 THE artwashing machine was on full spin at the Bomb Factory gallery in Marylebone recently with its "Fragile" exhibition.

The collection from 20 contemporary artists celebrated "the resilience and vulnerability of artists overcoming oppressive regimes or environments". This was quite a theme for an exhibition, curated by "human sculpture" Daniel Lismore, that is funded by the Tsukanov Family Foundation.

Banker's backing
The arts charity is run by UK-based banker Dr Natasha Tsukanova, whose glittering CV includes running JP Morgan's Russia investment unit during the 1990s and 2000s post-Soviet boom years for financiers.

This was followed, from 2009, by a position as mergers and acquisitions adviser to the Kremlin. There she worked with energy oligarch Igor Sechin, who has been one of Vladimir Putin's closest confidants ever since acting as his chief of staff when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the 1990s. He has been described as Putin's "de facto deputy" and currently runs state oil giant Rosneft.

Quite an "oppressive regime" backstory.

Tsukanova now runs Xenon Financial Partners, a "financial advisory boutique with a focus on cross-border M&As", and sits on the board of Cayman-registered private equity firm Kerogen. It specialises in energy investments and holds 65 percent of the shares in AJ Lucas, parent company of fossil-fuel-fracking giant Cuadrilla Resources.

Artists' impressions
Whether one of the artists burnishing the Tsukanova credentials, former lingerie magnate Joe Corré, was aware of this before signing up is not known. He has been a vociferous anti-fracking and anti-Cuadrilla campaigner alongside his late mother, Dame Vivienne Westwood (Eyes passim ad nauseam). (His piece in the exhibition was a coffin containing burnt shreds of the clothing designed by Westwood with her partner and Corré's dad, Malcolm McLaren.)

And surely unaware of the background to the exhibition was fellow exhibitor Nadia Tolokonnikova, a member of Putin's arch-enemy Pussy Riot collective.

Taking in a show
At least Tsukanova can do what she likes with her exhibition. Her husband Igor Tsukanov, also a former banker, had his own show of contemporary Ukrainian artists at London's Saatchi Gallery in 2022 scrapped over claims he was trying to burnish his reputation.

He wasn't helped by a fierce reaction to past descriptions of Ukrainian art by his co-organiser Marat Guelman as "southern Russian".