"Lenya Purygin from Nara the genius" (1951-1995) — a visionary artist, the creator of paintings, the author of tryptichs, the preacher of universal love, who immediately entered into the history of Soviet unofficial art and earned during his life the fame and success in Russia and abroad.

As mythmaker not only in his art, Purygin managed to fill with legends story his own life and it's still difficult to separate truth from fiction. As it turned out, "Lenya genius of Nara" wasn't born in Naro-Fominsk, but in the provincial military town in the Moscow region. And his father, a retired military, has never been the director of a local toy factory, and made a living by creating a model for the doll factory. At age 19, Leonid survived clinical death as a result of a suicide attempt, after which his worldview completely changed and Purygin was born as an artist.

"Lenya from Nara" always sought to emphasize the allegedly unprofessional nature of his work, designating his belonging to a "naive style" and "art-brut". But the primitive elements, as well as grammatical mistakes in the captions on the paintings, is the voluntary choice of the author. Purygin's system of values obviously puts him forward among other Soviet primitive artists. In addition, some early stages in professional education have taken place. In 1969, he attended studio at the Naro-Fominsk House of Culture, and later tried unsuccessfully to enter the Art School. He often visited the Tretyakov Gallery for the purpose of self-education. In early 1970's he regularly took part in the underground exhibitions of unofficial artists and made friends with the poet Dmitry Prigov, artist Arkady Petrov, art critic Vitaly Patsyukov. They and other well-known figures of the art scene became the characters of Purygin's art work.

The introduction of personal life in his art is very typical for Purygin. He often became the hero of his own paintings, presented in a variety of guises, sometimes only remotely resembling a real Lenya. But every such character, whether it's a master with a brush and palette in hand or personified animals and plants, is the 'alter ego' of the author and embodies the mysterious aspects of his inner life. 

Love and pain are two main forces that make up the cosmos in Purygin's art. All the characters undergo the impact of these two forces. Some of them show insatiable carnal desire, others merge in an ecstasy of love; there is a life-giving love of the Creator and there is the sacrificial love of the crucified Christ. Also, there is a light and a dark side in the suffering: the torture because of the original sin, violence against living beings, but also there is the suffering as a sacrificial atonement for the evil, caused the purification of the soul. Cosmos is the eternal pendulum between two polar forces, which do not contradict each other, but form a coherent picture of the universe. 

In this amazingly beautiful works Leonid Purygin covers all possible forms of good and evil with the power of his talent and imagination. He sincerely and truthfully depicts the world, which is a place for love and suffering, where good and evil are necessary for the existence of the world. "Cosmos is a beauty," says the artist.