Oleg Iakovleff was born in 1948 (September, 7) in Leningrad, USSR. In 1953 he moved to Moscow with his parents. At 12 years he displayed a keen interest in painting, learning it in Pushkin Museum (young art historians’ club). Later, while working, he got a chance to study at Vladimir Kozlinskiy (professor of Stroganovskiy Academy of Arts, head of drawing department) and his wife Marianna Knorre. His first one-man show took place in Moscow in 1964. From 1971 to 1975 Oleg Iakovleff worked in Institute of Technical Esthetics. In 1975 he took part in exhibition of nonconformist movement (V.D.N.K., Moscow – Autumn). In 1976 some 'apartment' exhibitions and shows took place. In 1977 he immigrated to Paris where he works and lives nowadays.
Oleg Iakovleff is one of the most interesting artists of abstract art movement in the Soviet art of the 1970s. Stemmed from Russian avant-garde tradition is his versatile merging of image and word on canvas surface. He juxtaposes different stylistic and semiotic codes, thus creating an ambitious message ripe with complex meaning. As Alexander Borovsky puts it: 'There is a breed of artists, who profess a visualization of realities other than our present being. It is a representation of the inner essence - psychic processes, consciousness patterns, perception workings.'