Pavel Leonov (Russian, 1920-2011) A football game signed in Cyrillic (lower right); with attached reproduction dated '1972' (verso) oil on canvas 60 x 44cm (23 5/8 x 17 5/16in). Footnotes: The present lot is offered with catalogue K. Bogemskaya, Naive Art: Pavel Leonov, St. Petersburg, 2005. (2) Provenance Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist's studio Pavel Leonov called his paintings inventions. Completely self-taught, he became one of the greatest 20th century Naïve artists. His success did not gather fame as he had hoped, not because of his lack of talent, but because of his circumstances and his enjoyment of the simple life. He created his own image of Russia in a way that has not been attempted before, through a style that belonged only to him. His earlier works were painted in gloomy colour and in them he kept elements of the 'correct' straightforward perspective. In the middle of the 1990's, art became richer in colour and paintings become completely flat. Leonov used this popularity of radical colours, feeling the rhythm with his coarse brush stroke and distorted figures. However, his distinction was in the way the artist created space. Leonov called his paintings constructions. In his paintings, he constructs a world and then places it in another. His work followed a grid-like system of vertical and horizontal lines. The sizes of the grid segments varied, and you can peep into them like into a television screen, into a separate scene. He usually began with the inner frame of the whole composition and then moved to the smaller frame. The depth was created through planes, each of which is parallel to the surface of the image and is the next picture within the picture. Leonov claimed that he always felt short of space – and he kept on evolving into larger formats. It is as if he wanted to embrace the whole world and the alternative world within his paintings and thus, establish an equilibrium between dream and reality. For comparable compositions created by Leonov in the early 1970s, Circus and By the factory (collection of State Russian House of Folk Art), see further Pavel Leonov. Paintings., Moscow, 2005, pp. 17, 21. This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: * * VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com