Leni and Seryozha Culture and Leisure Park

The exhibition project "Leni and Seryozha’s Culture and Leisure Park" will be held in the ARTSTORY gallery from September 19 to November 3, 2024. The exhibition brings together two artists who are different at first glance, but close in their perception of art. Leonid Purygin and Sergey Gorshkov were friends and even planned a joint exhibition, which they did not have time to implement. Almost thirty years after Leonid Purygin’s death, the ARTSTORY gallery will display more than 100 sculptures by Sergey Gorshkov and about 20 works by Leonid Purygin. Many works will be shown for the first time. Sergey Gorshkov created several new works especially for the exhibition, illustrating the attributes of the "female" and "male" worlds.

An improvised park of culture and recreation will be built in the large hall of the gallery with wooden sculptures, flower beds with exotic flowers, large-format paintings and monumental forms. In other spaces there will be a women’s boudoir and a men’s trophy room.

Sergey Gorshkov recalls: “I met Purygin in 1987 and unexpectedly heard a lot of good things about myself from him. We saw each other at exhibitions and in his studios, often talked on the phone, Lenya made plans, wanted to do this and that. Purygin worked a lot, believed that his paintings could influence our lives, make them better, so he hurried to create his own Paradise on earth. He also had Hell, but it was small - for scoundrels, communists and KGB agents. This was very close to me, the theme of Paradise and Fairy Tales runs through my whole life: flowers, butterflies, fish, naked girls and angels. At some point, Lenya started talking about doing something together, that my sculptures matched his paintings. The last time we spoke on the phone was when he came to Moscow from America a few days before his death.

When the ARTSTORY gallery suggested exhibiting their works together with those of Leonid Purygin, it seemed implausible and supernatural to me. As if Purygin had remembered his long-standing intention."

If Sergey Gorshkov takes reality as the basis of his works and transforms it, then Leonid Purygin, on the contrary, departs from this reality and creates his own world. Often the artist’s works require additional comments, and Purygin willingly gives them in texts - they do not so much explain the meaning, but rather create a more complete picture. The texts of the artist-publicist, artist-philosopher are bright and memorable. With all their emotionality and provocation, they are a kind of surrealist-symbolic manifesto of Purygin’s work.

Sergey Gorshkov is a prominent and well-known figure in the world of contemporary art. His work covers completely different genres: Gorshkov is known as a book illustrator and caricaturist, and as an original sculptor. The author’s favorite material, which he most often works with, is wood, the most tactile and "live" matter, from which the artist creates bright, cheerful characters.

Gorshkov takes inspiration for his plots from both everyday simple life and folk tales, phantasmagorias. Sergey Gorshkov transfers almost everything that exists in this life into his wooden, objective reality, giving it cheerful, primitivist features.

Gorshkov lives and works in Voronezh, is the art director of the contemporary art gallery "H.L.A.M." (Artists, Writers, Artists, Musicians), and also the co-founder of the art residence for artists "Divnogorye".

Leonid Purygin (1951-1995) was born in a military town near Naro-Fominsk to a family of a career officer who, after retiring, created doll models for a toy factory and even became its director. In 1965, he left school and lived on odd jobs. From 1969, he attended a studio at the Naro-Fominsk House of Culture. Several times, he unsuccessfully tried to enter the 1905 Art School. Performing as a painter since the early 1970s, he gained fame in the narrow sphere of apartment "underground". He was repeatedly admitted to psychiatric hospitals. In the 1980s, he occupied a studio on Furmanny Lane (which later gave its name to an entire trend of "unofficial" art), but went his own way without joining any groups.

In 1989, Purygin emigrated to the United States, where he received support from the Eduard Nakhamkin Gallery. In 1992, he organized an exhibition of contemporary Russian "naive art" and a special gallery, with the help of which he sought to support young artists stylistically close to him. He published three books of prose written in the "stream of consciousness" style. Purygin died in Moscow from a heart attack during another visit to his homeland.