[3] By the age of 18 she was studying with Stanislav Zhukovsky, and in 1908 entered the private studios of Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin.

In 1912 to 1913, she began attending the studios of the Cubist painters Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger at Académie de La Palette in Paris.

In 1912 she worked in a Moscow studio known as "The Tower" with Ivan Aksenov and Vladimir Tatlin, and also visited Sergei Shchukin's collection of modern French paintings.

After first exploring Impressionism, by 1913, in Composition with Figures, she was experimenting with the particularly Russian development of Cubo-Futurism: a fusion of two equal influences from France and Italy.

In 1914–1916 Popova together with other avant-garde artists (Aleksandra Ekster, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Olga Rozanova) contributed to the two Knave of Diamonds exhibitions, in Petrograd Tramway V and the 0.10, The Store in Moscow.

In the 5x5=25 Exhibition of 1921,[9] Popova and her four fellow Constructivists declared that easel painting was to be abandoned and all creative work was to be for the people and the making of the new society.

She produced stage designs: Vsevolod Meyerhold's production of Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922; her Spatial Force Constructions were used as the basis of her art teaching theory at Vkhutemas.

Popova died at the peak of her artistic powers two days after the death of her son, from whom she had contracted scarlet fever in 1924 in Moscow.

The exhibition included Popova's works such as seventy-seven paintings, as well as books, posters, textile designs, and line engravings.

[11] Rodchenko/Popova: Defining Constructivism, an exhibition of the work of Popova, Rodchenko, and other Constructivists was shown at Tate Modern, London, in 2009,[12] and subsequently at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.