DiDi Gallery prepared an unusual and extremely valuable event for Christmas and New Year. The new exhibition is dedicated to the most famous master of the “naive” art Pavel Leonov (1920–2011). His art works are shown in St. Petersburg for the first time.

According to art historians, the feature of Russian naive artists is that they turned to painting by being old people. This led to a peculiar creative message of their art, which gives an idea of the consciousness of ordinary Soviet people, formed at the dawn of Soviet power and imbued with utopian views and dreams of a reorganization of society. A well-known art historian and collector of Leonov's paintings, Ksenia Bogemskaya wrote that the ideas embodied by Russian primitivists were preserved in the minds of Soviet people for long time and, intertwined with fragments of traditional folklore, acquired a mythological form and fantastic character.

The creation of such an imaginary world is also characteristic of the works by Pavel Leonov. His paintings embodies Russian folk mythology, where rulers, writers, literary heroes and Christian images are combined into an unusual pantheon, which is a montage of our cultural background. And the dream of an improved world, on the verge of paradise, is paradoxically achieved by a master in a super-realistic, artistic dimension.