BIO
Yuri Leonov (b. 1987, USSR) is a visual artist whose paintings and drawings extend classical technique into unstable, layered fields of abstraction, confession, and bodily inquiry. Rooted in precise draftsmanship, live observational drawing, and a long-developed ballpoint pen practice, his work moves through dense accumulations of paint, line, imprint, and surface interference, often building images through dozens of transparent and disruptive layers. Emerging from the artist’s lived experience with Crohn’s disease, Leonov’s concept of “human disease” frames the body not only as subject, but as structure, system, and metaphor: a site where order and collapse, growth and contamination, self-awareness and biological vulnerability become inseparable. His “fleshmaps”—handprints, fingerprints, and bodily traces—extend this logic across micro and macro scales, linking the intimate evidence of touch to broader questions of humanity’s place within nature, technology, and cycles of disruption. Throughout his work, Leonov fuses realism and abstraction, classical control and experimental risk, using painting as a process of honest diagnosis rather than illustration.
Leonov’s work is deeply informed by philosophy, science, and the search for systems capable of explaining human experience without reducing its contradictions. Plato’s Cave and Divided Line became foundational frameworks within the artist’s practice, shaping his understanding of perception, illusion, and the tension between material reality and underlying essence. Equally influential is a Socratic mode of inquiry inherited through family—particularly the artist’sgrandmother, whose presence recurs throughout the work as both memory and philosophical grounding. Across his practice, Leonov approaches painting as a method of questioning: an attempt to understand awareness through structures, repetitions, and systems that simultaneously reveal and confine human existence. Running parallel to these philosophical concerns is the influence of post-industrial music and the turbulent atmosphere of 1990s St. Petersburg, where collapse, instability, and confrontation became embedded into the emotional texture of the work. This tension between disciplined structure and emotional fracture remains central to Leonov’s practice, where classical observation, abstraction, scientific imagery, confession, and material experimentation emerge from genuine introspection and a continual search for resolution. Rather than resolving contradiction, the work allows opposing conditions to remain visible—mirroring reality itself as unstable, cyclical, and perpetually in conflict with its own structures.
Leonov received his BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where hewas awarded the Silas H. Rhodes Scholarship and Thesis Scholarship. His solo exhibitions include Remain at White Rabbit, New York, and Ontological at Skylight Gallery, New York. Alongside his studio practice, Leonov has developed an extensive professional background across mural painting, portraiture, commissions, film, decorative art, art handling, teaching, and community-based arts programming. He has executed large-scale murals with major New York mural companies for clients including Bacardi, Balenciaga, Citi, Dell, Adult Swim, Hendrick’s, Kara Walker, and PepsiCo; worked as an art handler for Marlborough Gallery; served as Exhibitions and Program Coordinator at Saratoga Arts; and organized and led life drawing programs in Brooklyn from 2013 to 2020.
CONTACT
To see more examples of commercial work please download the VISUAL PORTFOLIO
To commission a portrait please download the PORTRAIT PRESENTATION
Please email or call with any questions about paintings, murals, teaching etc.
yuri@yurileonov.com
917 693 2576
All images are copyright Yuri Leonov 2026
All rights reserved
SOLO/TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2013
Divided Line, Muchmore's, Brooklyn, NY
Ontological, Skylight Gallery, New York, NY
2011
Remain, White Rabbit, New York, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2015
The Happening 3, Cloud City, Brooklyn, NY
Show #1, Chi Chi Factory, Brooklyn, NY
Realms of the Unreal, Gristle Tattoo, Brooklyn, NY
Litha Symphony Orchestra Fundraiser Gala, Church of the Holy Apostles, New York, NY
2014
The Happening 2, Gristle Tattoo, Brooklyn, NY
You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone, Myplasticheart, New York, NY
Elusive Key, Gristle Tattoo, Brooklyn, NY
Hypercritical, Littlefield, Brooklyn, NY
2013
Perepeteia II, Skylight Gallery, New York, NY
Kaleidoscope, Muchmore's, Brooklyn, NY
The Happening, Skylight Gallery, New York, NY
Single Fare 3, RH Gallery, New York, NY
2012
Black Cube Collective Launch,Art’s complex, gallery 1, Edinburgh, UK
Signs of the Apocalypse, Myplasticheart, New York, NY
Society of Illustrators Student Competition Exhibition, New York, NY
69th Armory: Fountain Art Fair (with Dacia Gallery), New York, NY
Love and Other Drugs, Grit N Glory, New York, NY
Hyperboreans, Dacia Gallery, New York, NY
2011
Black Sheep, AC Gears, New York, NY
Plexus, Dacia Gallery, New York, NY
Open Studios, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
Efflorescence, Dacia Gallery, New York, NY
Peripeteia I, White Rabbit, New York, NY
2010
Social, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
Classical Myths Transformed, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY