Pavel Otdelnov

Pavel Otdelnov
Otdelnov in 2018
Born	Pavel Aleksandrovich Otdelnov (1979-06-19) 19 June 1979 Dzerzhinsk, Russia
Alma mater	V. Surikov Moscow State Academy Art Institute (1999—2007)
Known for	Painting, installation art
Notable work	Internal Degunino serie (Kandinsky Prize 2015 nominee), Promzona (Winner of the Innovation Art Prize 2020), Ringing Trace
Style	Industrial landscape painting
Awards	2015, 2017, 2019 — Kandinsky Prize long list 2017 — The Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award short list and Special award of French Institute in St. Petersburg (White sea. Black hole project) 2020 — The Artist of the Year by Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair 2020 — Winner of the Innovation Art Prize (with the Promzona project) 2021 — Kandinsky Prize short list (with the Promzona project)
Patron(s)	Pavel Nikonov (co-founder of 'Severe Style' of Soviet Art; Surikov State Academy Art Institute professor)
Website	otdelnov.com

Pavel Aleksandrovich Otdelnov (Russian: Павел Александрович Отдельнов, 19 June 1979 in Dzerzhinsk, USSR) is an artist working in painting, drawing, video, installations, and exploring such subjects as urban space, environment, Soviet history, and historical memory.

Biography

Pavel Otdelnov was born in the town of Dzerzhinsk Nizhny Novgorod Region, a major cluster of the Soviet chemical industry. In the 1930s, the artist's family was employed at local chemical enterprises. Given its industrial background, Dzerzhinsk faced an economic decline and neglect after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has served as one of the sources of imagery and subject matter for Otdelnov.

According to the artist, he has always dreamt of becoming an artist and began his creative practices as a kid. Having graduated from an art club and art school in his hometown, Otdelnov enrolled at the Nizhny Novgorod Art College, where from 1994 to 1999 he was instructed by Pavel Rybakov. His early exhibitions took place during that time: the group show Miezdunarodny Plener Malarski in Sławków, Poland in 1997, and a personal exhibition at the Peter's House exhibition hall in Nizhny Novgorod in 1999. In 1999, he submitted as his graduation project the painting Cargo 200, based on the artist's meetings and discussions with veterans of local wars. The title is a reference to the military code name for the carriage of dead soldiers as cargo. Otdelnov explains his goal then as creating an image of a person broken by war and unable to reintegrate into a peaceful society. For this graduation project, the artist spoke to soldiers who had returned from the Afghanistan and Chechen wars.

In 1999–2005, Otdelnov studied at V. Surikov Moscow State Academy Art Institute in Moscow in the Painting Department under the instruction of Pavel Nikonov and Yuri Shishkov, where among his groupmates were Egor Plotnikov, Evgenia Buravleva, Dmitry Samodin, Maxim Smirennomudrensky, Nikolay Smirnov. In 2005, he presented the graduation project in the form of a Gospel-inspired series. The project was made in line with the traditions of his training studio which focused major attention on plastic craftsmanship: composition structure, rhythm, the painting plane, and space. Otdelnov's works from his student years are marked by the influence of the Soviet painting of the 1920s and 1930s.

From 2005 to 2007, he was a post-graduate student at Surikov Art Institute. In 2007, Otdelnov started a Livejournal.com blog, which became a most effective tool of self-education for him where he posted reviews and essays on art and current exhibitions.

In 2014–2015, he studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow. As part of the training program, Otdelnov created I Shop Therefore I Am, a work contemplating the mutual penetration of art and commerce and an homage to Barbara Kruger.

Style and technique

Otdelnov is trained as an academic painter. The curriculum of the art college was based on studying Socialist Realism art and had a major focus on painting from life. His works from his student and early years are marked by such influences as Pavel Nikonov, Nikolay Andronov and Andrey Vasnetsov. During that period Otdelnov's output was primarily in the form of paintings. His works of the 2000s explore the formal aspects of painting: the properties of colors and materials, interrelation of dimensions, and unconventional compositions. In 2009–2010, Otdelnov's artistic vocabulary is gradually evolving: blocky impasto painting grows more refined and polished, the canvas space gets deeper, the expressive successions of color areas, textures, and paint drips are subdued in favor of softer gradients. The artist himself comments on this period of change as follows: For a long time, while I was studying, it was assumed that painting was self-sufficient: the paint and its movement on the plane, its traces left by the artist, the mass of the painting — were seen as valuable in their own right. Even if painting is still very important for me, I think I have moved away from this mindset to a degree. In 2015 the artist began to film videos, and in 2016 he exhibited photographs for the first time. In Otdelnov's view, the painting as a medium is linked with the category of time. He compares his mode of perception with how timelapse footage works, which enables a disinterested perspective and detection of changes in familiar landscapes and mundane life:

I often wonder: is it possible to see the present time? <...> The reality evades examination, it mimics the mundane, and the familiar, and becomes indistinguishable. I think it is possible to capture the present if you employ the 'slowed-down gaze', like a timelapse. This is how you notice change in the familiar landscapes. Another important tool is temporal distancing, where, in your mind, you build a distance from the object. Thus, at a distance, the novelty is turned into ruins. A painting already has this distance embedded into it because it is rooted in history. The static nature of painting is none other than the freeze-captured duration itself.

— Pavel Otdelnov, [1]

Otdelnov seeks to rethink the painting's status and engage it not as a self-sufficient medium but as a part of installations. Starting from the mid-2010s, he created large-scale artistic research projects (Promzona, Ringing Trace). As part of such projects and alongside videos, found objects, and historical documents, paintings serve as a means to comprehend the past. When describing Otdelnov's language, art critics point out similarities in his techniques with Gerhard Richter, the Düsseldorf School of Photography, and the artists Pavel Nikonov, Semen Faĭbisovich, Michael Roginsky, and Erik Bulatov. The artist himself also considers as important influences the Russian lyrical landscape artists of the 19th century, as well as Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Gregor Schneider, Jeremy Deller, Rachel Whiteread, Cyprien Gaillard.

In his search for an independent way out to go beyond the boundaries of the Soviet, the artist combines the subjects of memory and social sensitivity with the cold panoramic perspective, borrowed from the masters of the Düsseldorf School of Photography (the architecture of Otdelnov's canvases, with their deliberately distanced view and certain color combinations, has evolved in its base DNA from the artworks by Andreas Gursky). The other core reference in his method is the late painting by the Sixtiers, who were (cf. Pavel Nikonov) trying to disentangle themselves from the rigidity of the austere style by oversaturating their canvases with blazing Sun. Skewed in a photographic fashion, Otdelnov's landscapes are swamped in waves of luminescent and dusky light. Lightweight shadows painted with just one layer. For Otdelnov, the art of Richter and Gursky has become a kind of antidote to late Soviet painting; otherwise, the risk would be too high to stay within that murky haze, which had been addressed periodically by Roginsky, Nikonov, and Faibisovich, and Obrosov. It is important also that the artists of the Düsseldorf School of Photography offered a way to process national trauma other than the Soviet approach. Alongside the well-known abstraction of post-Soviet outskirts, these are the elements that compose Otdelnov's work in the early and mid-2010s.

— Maxim Burov, Nadia Plungian

Early work

Combine. Retrospective, 2007—2008

Pavel Otdelnov. Construction. 2008

In 2007, Otdelnov and Egor Plotnikov went on a creative journey to Western Siberia where for two weeks they observed the operations of the Novokuznetsk Iron and Steel Plant and West-Siberian Metal Plant, two industrial behemoths built during the Soviet industrialization. The trip was initiated by Pavel Nikonov as a continuation of the Soviet practice of creative travel assignments. The idea behind this particular trip was to reconceptualize the experience of artists who participated in expeditions to major national construction projects in the 1920s–30s: Alexander Drevin, Alexander Labas, Alexander Tyshler, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Alexander Shevchenko, and others. The resulting series of paintings by Otdelnov and Plotnikov based on photos and sketches from the trip were exhibited at Heritage Gallery in May 2012. In Otdelnov's words, that visit to Novokuznetsk enabled a view of the Soviet industrial architecture as ancient ruins, akin to the Baths of Caracalla or a Roman Forum, that apparently achieved reconciliation with the surrounding landscape and became its part.

Land. Sky, 2007—2008

In 2007–2008 Otdelnov painted a series of five abstract landscapes where he amalgamated the inflection of the Russian lyrical landscapes from the 19th century and the expressive language of abstract painting. In his LiveJournal, the artist refers to Alexei Savrasov and Mark Rothko as the two main sources for the series Land. Sky. Three of the five landscapes from it were exhibited at Art Sanatorium, an exhibition hosted by the Tretyakov Gallery in 2010. This was Otdelnov's first attempt to present painting as part of an installation. The canvases were hung in a specially constructed isolated room with black walls, an invitation for the viewer to come inside and be surrounded by the acutely familiar Central Russia landscapes.

Google Landscapes and Urban Outskirts

Around the same time, Otdelnov began working with images found on Google Maps or its satellite service (Highway, 2009; Highway II, 2010; the Color Fields series, 2010). Here, he seeks to contemplate the landscape from a removed perspective, whereby the computer screen acts as a filter to set a certain distance between the landscape and the artist. One of the notable influences on Otdelnov at the time was the Godfrey Reggio movie Koyaanisqatsi, with a minimalist score composed by Philip Glass.

In the 2010s the artist lived in Khimki near Moscow and travelled to his studio in the capital every day. During his commute, Otdelnov was able to take in the landscapes of the Moscow outskirts and he spent his weekend wandering around residential areas or the big waste dump not far from his home. These observation practices resulted in the series titled Metro, 2009–2010; In Motion, 2010; and the painting Desert, 2010, where the artist addresses for the first time the motifs central to his subsequent art: the urban outskirts, landfills, and abandoned plots.

Neon Landscape, 2012

In the fall of 2012, Otdelnov had his first solo show in Moscow where he presented the painting series Neon Landscape (Agency. Art Ru Gallery). The paintings made in oil on canvas and on wood focused on the exploration of the nature of light. The setting of choice was airport terminals, passageways and runways, metro stations, and highways, and the main protagonist was artificial lighting – coalescing into lines that are usually disregarded as background and remain unseen, even if they actually guide our movement through urban space.

Urban Outskirts and Non-places

Inner Degunino, 2013—2014

In 2013, Otdelnov began the series Inner Degunino, where he depicts Moscow's residential areas and draws inspiration from the Zapadnoye Degunino District, situated near the Moscow Ring Road, comprising mostly industrial facilities and pre-fab mass housing of type P-44. According to the artist, his aim was to construct an image of the modern Russian landscape, uncover the features of our time usually unseen through the habitual optics. This is primarily about the deserted post-Soviet landscapes, with their power transmission lines stretching into the void, with the ubiquitous pre-fab panel housing, and the gloomy sky. The author's take on the architecture of residential areas with spot inclusions of industrial plants across the endless snowy expanse drew the attention of David Elliott, a curator of the 4th International Biennale for Young Art, which then featured Otdelnov's paintings at the Biennale in the summer of 2014. The exposition garnered high praise from art critics and culture correspondents. In October 2014, Otdelnov exhibited the completed Inner Degunino series at a solo show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Inner Degunino was featured in the top 50 most prominent art projects of 2014 according to the editorial board of AroundArt; was ranked 3rd in the readership survey for the best exhibition; and was nominated in 2015 for the Kandinsky Art Award in the Project of the Year category. The image of the artist's painting Arc from the Inner Degunino project was used in 2014 on the album cover for a Nizhny Novgorod band, KernHerbst, where the artist's brother Leonid Otdelnov is a member.

What Pavel Otdelnov puts in oil on canvas is that what we are used to pass or drive by as quickly as possible, that is, the industrial facilities, power plant smokestacks, and other ungainly features of the Russian landscape. The artist is not as much interested in form as he is interested in space. He peers into the familiar landscape, peels off all that is superfluous – namely the people and the vehicles – to make, say, an overpass stretching beyond the horizon into an object lost somewhere in the coldness of outer space.

— Alexandra Shestakova,

Pavel Otdelnov, whose artistic vocabulary is likewise located at the junction of photographic and painterly aesthetic dimensions (by his own admission, he has been influenced by the modern photographer Andreas Gursky, as well as the Russian pop artist and painter Mikhail Roginsky), <...> explores the architecture of the sites set to become monuments of the next, post-industrial era which will not leave in its wake palaces and cathedrals. His paintings feature not industrial landmarks, but landmarks of consumption and communication: Pavel Otdelnov images of Shopping malls on the outskirts, fuel stations, and highways. However, the beauty found by the artist in these facilities, which only recently began to dot our living space, is far from the pop-art ironic apologia of the flashy ephemerality of the current moment.

— Irina Kulik,

Mall, 2015—2016

Pavel Otdelnov. Mall. Lego. 2015

Otdelnov continued to explore the subject of post-Soviet urban outskirts in his project Mall, dedicated to the shopping centers that emerged around residential areas of Russian cities in the well-off "noughties". The artist depicts the bright boxes of malls surrounded by decrepit pre-fab panel houses as if they were glitches — visual artifacts caused by a software error. The Mall was exhibited at Triumph Gallery in late 2015. The preface to the exhibition gives the artist's own account of why he turned to glitches:

These innumerable shopping centers crop up next to residential and industrial areas <...> Then this mall, plopped into the endless expanse of our country and among the post-Soviet micro-districts and garages, is very similar to a computer error, a program failure, a glitch. One of the more common causes of glitches is the mismatch between the software's purpose and the task executed by the user. A "glitched-out" mall can be described as a metaphor for the disconnect between the post-Soviet reality and the market relations within emerging capitalism, <...> an unstable event in the stable space.

— Pavel Otdelnov, [2]

A year later, in November 2016, the series was exhibited at the exhibition Mall. The Time of Colorful Sheds was organized as part of the Non-Places Programme run by the Department of Research Art and hosted by the Smena Center of Contemporary Culture in Kazan. In 2015, Otdelnov's contemplations on the notion of glitches in the post-Soviet landscape were presented at two other exhibition projects. In July 2015, he made a total installation for the exhibition Piece of Space Traversed by Mind at the New Wing of Gogol Museum on Nikitsky Boulevard: he painted a monochrome landscape on the walls with a snow field, gray sky, and power transmission line pylons, and the "glitch" was manifested in Lego bricks suspended on thin wire. In 2015, Otdelnov also participated in Expanding Space. Art Practices in the Urban Environment, a project aimed at creative exploration of contemporary phenomena and features of Moscow, organized by V-A-C Foundation. Otdelnov proposed a large-scale object constructed with bright composite panels to be installed next to the Moscow Ring Road near the 81st kilometer. It employed the parallax effect to make the structure seem stably whole from one vantage point but, as the perspective shifts, to disintegrate into parts becoming fluid and unstable. This piece was meant to imitate abandoned or uncompleted mall projects that look like a disruption in the landscape and, at the same time, symbolize the volatility in the economy.

Filled with emptiness, the urban-and-industrial landscapes of residential outskirts, introduced earlier in the artist's previous series Inner Degunino and now recognized as Otdelnov's signature visual subject, are invaded by colorful pixels in the new batch of works <...> The familiar urban objects in Otdelnov's landscapes invite the viewer in, into the depth of slushy plains where pre-fab residential towers and power grid pilons stand high. Yet, this apparent depth in cold grays is broken up sporadically, falling apart into colorful pixels, telling us that the entirety of perceived reality is illusory. We are not really in Degunino but just watching a report from there.

— Konstantin Zatsepin,

Russian Nowhere, 2020—2021

Russian Nowhere. Exhibition view

The next project by Otdelnov that addressed the subject of post-Soviet wastelands and non-places was the Russian Nowhere, exhibited at Triumph Gallery in 2021. The artist searched for imagery by traveling the country through Yandex and Google Street View. For the paintings, he chose the most banal and typical images that could be taken anywhere in Russia. Next to the landscapes, Otdelnov placed illuminated red-letter signs, fashioned after the ubiquitous shop signage. The sign texts were borrowed from online comments in such social media communities as The Beauty Of Blight, Birch Tree, Russian Death, etc. Philosopher Svetlana Polyakova noted the extreme degree of dehumanization in the landscapes of this series:

In Russian Nowhere, Pavel Otdelnov has aptly captured this recently emergent phenomenon in the collective sensibility of dealing with the loss of the future as a human project. A person is not a project of their own anymore, the person has now denounced the myths, which used to hold power over us, of being the architect of our own futures. The initiative now lies with non-human actors: the natural entropy that prevails and erases from the face of the earth the remains of grand social utopias, the onslaught of new deadly viruses brought about by the environmental disaster, the menacing self-animation of technology.

— Svetlana Polyakova,

Pavel Otdelnov is aware that direct replication of reality is impossible, so he uses another optic – machine vision and collective human intelligence. This typifies his work as post-conceptualism. Turning to landscapes that are no longer used or populated, the artist reaffirms their existence and proposes to define them based on negation. Although these places actually exist, their description or identification, even supported by an accurate image, is not possible. This "nowhere" is in fact everywhere, emerging from the void, which is, in the end, the main character in Otdelnov's work.

— Marina Bobyleva,

Following the exhibition at Triumph, the project was shown at the Yeltsin Centre in Ekaterinburg.

In 2021, The Village, an online media outlet, reported on a new coinage Otdelnovesque — referring to the state of alienation and despondency.

Environmental issues

Sand and landscapes of the Kazanka River floodplain, 2016—2017

In 2016, as part of the Non-Places Program run by the Department of Research Art, an interdisciplinary project in Moscow, Otdelnov went to Kazan for a residency at the Smena Center of Contemporary Culture. He met local environmental experts and activists who were trying to counter planned construction projects in the Kazanka River floodplain. While in residency, he shot the film Sand and painted landscapes of the Kazanka River .

Psychozoic Era, 2018—2019

Pavel Otdelnov. Psychozoic Era. 2018

In 2018, Otdelnov further explored the environmental issues in a new film and installation, titled collectively the Psychozoic Era. The project depicted Russian industrial waste storage facilities and their impacts on the environment and people.

Shitty Sea, 2019—2020

In 2020, within the frames of the 8th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Otdelnov made Shitty Sea, a project exploring the challenges of collection, sorting, and recycling of waste, as well as the problem of the ever-proliferating landfills around Moscow. The artist planted GPS beacons into garbage bags and threw them out in different parts of Moscow to track their movements. Eventually, he visited the municipal landfills and waste sorting facilities where they ended up. The process and outcomes of this research are presented in the film The Trash Trip (2019), the paintings Landfill Aleksndrov and Landfill Timokhovo (2019), MSW (2020), Rubbish and Waste Sorting (2020). To gain a deeper insight into waste sorting, Otdelnov took a job at one such facility. An account of his observations and conversations with other sorting workers are recorded in The Waste Sorter's Diary.

Research projects

Promzona, 2015—2020

For four years, from 2015 to 2020, Otdelnov was working on a large-scale project titled Promzona (Industrial Cluster). The project explores the history of the artist's hometown of Dzerzhinsk and of his family. The project relied on a whole range of approaches: Otdelnov studied archival photos and newspaper clippings, personal notes, essays, and documents, met with environmental experts and former factory workers, he wandered around the exclusion zones, factory ruins, and the overgrown workers' camp. Through various media — painting, photography, video, installation, texts, and ready-made objects — the project offers both a historical and personal perspective on the era that had finally passed. The exhibition was supplemented with excerpts from published memoirs by workers and engineers of Dzerzhink's many plants as well as from No Entry Without Gas Mask, a book authored by the artist's father Alexander Otdelnov. Parts of the project were presented at exhibitions at the Stavropol Regional Museum of Fine Arts; Belyaevo Gallery, Moscow; Arsenal Center for Contemporary Art, Nizhny Novgorod; Victoria Gallery, Samara; main program of the 4th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg; FUTURO Gallery, Nizhny Novgorod; Oktava Creative Industrial Cluster, Tula. In 2019, the project was displayed in full at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Otdelnov's Promzona received the Innovation Award in 2020 and was short-listed for the Kandinsky Prize in 2021. An abridged version was on display from February to March 2022 at the Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden.

Promzona. Exhibition view

While employing the formats of a documentary exhibition and a post-modern spectacle exhibition, Otdelnov's Promzona is neither. This is not a research exhibition but rather an immersive experience, which is not made in strict alignment with the post-modernist tradition due to its rejection of self-objectivation and reveling in (another's) trauma. <...> The subject matter in Promzona is the uninspired mundanity of the late-Soviet social context. <...> The space of sorrow in the exposition is more important than making a political statement or showcasing the documentary truth. <...> The artist's reserved tone is often at odds with the post-modernist style in language – from the cool tone of Vladimir Sorokin, which is a facade for social malice, to Svetlana Alexievich, whose characters overwhelm the reader with an expression of their pain and horror. Neither subversion nor hyperrealism are of any interest to Otdelnov; he is equally far removed from Faĭbisovich or Kabakov. It is often argued that this difference is caused by the anonymity of the weak and inadequate artistic language of the 2010s. This is not the point, however; it is that the 2010s are not upset with the Soviet legacy. They are willing to process this trauma but not ready to identify with it. By keeping in touch with the voices of those who witnessed the 20th century (his grandmother, father, the former POW Claus Fritzsche), Otdelnov investigates how they correlate with the present times. The artist's objective is to not get stuck in the past, but to capture the point where the Soviet experience, while still the experience of his family, no longer affects him.

— Nadia Plungian and Maxim Burov,

In 2020 Welsh musician and filmmaker Geraint Rhys made a short documentary film In the Footsteps of Ghosts about Pavel Otdelnov's Promzona. The film was awarded Honourable Mention at the New York Film Festival and became the Winner of Best Documentary at the Moscow Shorts International Film Festival in January 2020.

Otdelnov's Dzerzhinsk is not just an aestheticized ruin to be contemplated melancholically, it is an entire foregone parallel future. Hence the sharply slanted angles in the compositions, cf. Alexander Rodchenko. Hence the intense gazing into the abstract patches of exfoliating paint and crisscrossing of electrical wires. This is a ruin of modernity itself – with its scale, grandness, optimism, and absolute inhumanity. <...> Pavel's practice, the study of modernity through its practical traces and marks, is akin to an archeological expedition to excavate Uruk in Mesopotamia. You would not want to go back to those mythical times, but you would experience the poignant presence of ghosts.

— Vladimir Dudchenko,

I am tremendously impressed. This exhibition is a museum and a novel in itself. It has Stalker (the Zone and its portrait), and West of the Tracks by Wang Bing, and 24 City by Jia Zhangke — two great post-industrial epics by Chinese filmmakers – and In Memory of Memory... and a fully magical, mystical sense of the Soviet dystopia, in the name and for the sake of which people were ready to give their lives and kill, but then just lost faith in it – and so, it collapsed on its own.

— Anton Dolin,

Ringing trace, 2021

The dorm building of the former secret Laboratory B in Sungulʹ

In the fall of 2021, invited by the Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Otdelnov created a project about the history of the nuclear industry in the Southern Urals. The project was exhibited at the former dormitory of the secret Laboratory B in the village of Sokol, Chelyabinsk Region. During the Soviet time, the lab studied radiobiology, but over the recent few decades, the dorms have been vacant and in disrepair. The artist structured the exposition as a parallel alternative to that of a local history museum. Alongside the newly created paintings, the exhibits included found documents and records, which resonated deeply with Pavel. Each of the 21 rooms in the exhibition narrates the different aspects of the history of the nuclear industry: the invention of the atomic bomb, the 1957 explosion at the Mayak Facility and its liquidators, the Chelyabinsk radioactive trace and the villages that it killed, the secret lingo of nuclear scientists and the daily life in closed towns, the poisoned Techa River, which had been receiving dumps of heavy radioactive waste in 1949–1952 while the riverside population continued to use its water. The project was deemed a success by both the audience and critics and recognized as one of the best at the Biennale. Despite its remote location, the exposition was visited by many people from all across Russia, and upon completion of the Biennale program, it was decided to make the exhibit permanent. The exposition became officially permanent in 2022.

Pavel Otdelnov. Relocated. 2021

It is not seen to be in good taste among the contemporary critic circles to give unbridled praise to any artwork, but the project by Pavel Otdelnov is without a shadow of a doubt the best on display at the Ural Biennale. It is definitely worth the travel from Moscow to Ekaterinburg, even if it is the one thing you'll see there, at an abandoned constructivist health resort, after a two-hour additional trip to the town of Sokol.

— Alina Streltsova,

The story of EURT (the Eastern Ural Radioactive Trace) takes on a special meaning when told by a person who grew up in Dzerzhinsk, resonating as a deeply personal drama, but not without skillful inclusions of universal subjects – the trauma of totalitarianism, the collapse of the scientific, technological and many other utopias, the colonization of peoples and nature, criticism of militarization, environmental concerns. Taking the genre of painting as a starting point – and advancing through the ruinated painting, post-painting, painted from a photo and almost completely discolored, to an extent that it assimilates fully with the background of shabby plaster, which is a deliberate choice since the painting is not meant here to be a thing of its own or be confined to the boundaries of canvas – the artist, who has transcended academism, expands it into a multi-media (featuring texts, ready-made objects, immersive environments, light, sounds, and even, I think, scents) installation.

— Anna Tolstova,

The research exhibitions by Pavel Otdelnov are always very pointed and accurate in their structure, where the painting (Pavel started out as a painter in the genre of the industrial landscape, by the way) is thoughtfully integrated, to great effect, with other media, artifacts, and personal raw history, thereby enabling representation of seemingly abstract subjects on the most personalized and directly engaging level. The exhibition Ringing Trace staged in Sokol is no exception; rather, it might be the most impressive project in this "series" yet.

— Sergey Timofeev,

War

Unheimlich, 2015

In 2015, when the war in Eastern Ukraine was already ongoing, Otdelnov built an installation titled Unheimlich for the War Museum exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. A typical cozy room with a carpet, a floor lamp, and an armchair was supplemented with subtle details that marked the presence of war: a toy tank coming from behind the armchair, and armed soldiers hiding in the floral patterns of the carpet. Where does one discover the nostalgia for past greatness? the artist wonders. Might it be possible that we, following Freud, should look for the unheimlich in the homely, habitual, lived-in? Additionally and as a reference to Martha Rosler's Bring the War Home, the artist makes a series of photographic collages that juxtaposed the interiors of his relatives' apartments and the views of the cities ravaged by the war in the Donetsk Region. Examining a photo of the destroyed airport in Donetsk, Otdelnov painted No Flights Today (2015) captures the devastating horror of war and the proximity of death.

Field of Experiments and Hands of War, 2022

In February 2022, Otdelnov spoke out openly against Russia's military invasion of Ukraine. In the spring of 2022, he made a series of drawings, titled Hands of War, based on photos from war correspondents and public events that were being held in support of Vladimir Putin's policies in Russia. In March–April 2022, he made a series of watercolors titled Field of Experiments that was exhibited at the Kalmar Art Museum in Sweden in the summer of 2022. All the watercolors depict a deserted snowy field where isolated images appear here and there: a concrete fence, a checkpoint, a red carpet, a burnt-down house, naked human figures drowning in the snow. The name of this series is a reference to a famous song by the Russian rock band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense), titled Russian Filed of Experiments, an absurdist and terrifying text about cruelty and death. These watercolors present metaphorical images that are, in the artist's view, instrumental in comprehending the unfolding events.

Working on this series, I have been asking myself: How to address the deprivation of an entire generation of their future? How to express the idea of geopolitical dominance in a metaphor? How to express the feeling of loneliness and unwanted isolation from my homeland? Can the sense of the vast expanse coexist as one with claustrophobia?

— Pavel Otdelnov, [3]

Acting Out, 2022

In the fall of 2022, Otdelnov opened an exhibition Acting Out at Pushkin House, an independent Russian cultural center in the center of London. It unfolded over three floors, works on each level were forming a chapter of a larger narrative around the Soviet past and its uses and abuses in contemporary Russia.

The series Acting Out was an attempt to produce a reflection on the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe caused by the Russian war in Ukraine and to find signs hidden throughout history, leading to the war we have today.

Others

In cooperation with Kovcheg Gallery Otdelnov displayed his works in Personal Acquaintance exhibition within the Parallel Programme of the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2009 and contemporary art fairs in Cologne in 2010 and 2011. Throughout the 2011 Russia-Spain Year of Culture Otdelnov's personal exhibitions took place in Madrid, Alcala de Henares, and Esquivias. In 2013 Pavel Otdelnov's artworks were shortlisted for Strabag Artaward International. In 2013—2015 Otdelnov participated in several exhibitions organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, including collaborative projects with Goldsmith College. In the "Perception transfers. From analog to digital" exhibition Otdelnov presented an installation that combined an artwork based on a Google Street View image with an open laptop, placed over the table easel.

In 2014, Otdelnov provided artworks for Smile & Christie's charity auction. In 2015 Otdelnov participated in the Portrait Now! competition for Brewer J. C. Jacobsen's Portrait Award and participated in two exhibitions in Russia's major museums: Tretyakov Gallery presented his paintings in "Metageography. Space — Image — Action" special project of the 6th Moscow biennial of contemporary art while State Russian Museum picked his artworks for "Russia. Realism. XXI century" exhibition.

Selected exhibitions, works in collections

Personal exhibitions

• 2005 — Canvas. Time. Space, Chamber of Commerce, Dzerzhinsk
• 2006 — The way home, Central Exhibitions Hall, Nizhny Novgorod
• 2010 – 2012 — Otra Cotidianidad, series of exhibitions (Quinta del Berro Cultural Center, Madrid; Casa de los Picos, Segovia; Juana Frances hall, Madrid; Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes, Alcala de Henares; Nicholas Salmeron cultural centre, Madrid; Casa de Cervantes, Eskivias; Centro Ruso de Ciencia y Cultura, Madrid)
• 2012 — Neon landscape, Art.Ru Agency, Moscow
• 2014 — Inner Degunino, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow
• 2014 — The First Principle of Dialectics (joint exhibition with Egor Plotnikov), Open Club Gallery, Moscow
• 2014 — No man's land (join exhibition with Julia Malinina, within the Parallel Programme of the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art), Grinberg Gallery, Moscow
• 2015 — Hall of fame, Stavropol Arts Museum, Stavropol
• 2015 — Mall, Triumph Gallery, Moscow
• 2016 — Territory of accumulated damage, Belyaevo Gallery, Moscow
• 2016 — "Deserts". 2002 – 2017, Belyaevo Gallery, Moscow
• 2016 — White sea. Black hole, Arsenal national center for contemporary arts, Nizhny Novgorod
• 2016 — Mall. Time of Colorful Sheds, Centre of Contemporary Culture SMENA, Kazan
• 2017 — Ruins, Victoria Art Gallery, Samara
• 2018 — Chemical Plant, FUTURO Gallery, Nizhny Novgorod
• 2018 — Factory Anecdotes, Creative Industrial Cluster Oktava, Tula
• 2019 — Promzona, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow
• 2021 — Russian Nowhere, Triumph Gallery, Moscow
• 2021 — Russian Nowhere, The Art Gallery of Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, Yekaterinburg
• 2021 — Ringing Trace, within the Artist-in-Residence program of the 6th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, company dormitory of the Laboratory B, Sokol village, Chelyabinsk region
• 2022 — Promzona, Uppsala konstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden
• 2022 — The Field of Experiments, Kalmar konstmuseum, Sweden
• 2022 — Acting Out, Pushkin house, London, England
• 2024 — Hometown, The Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye railway station, London, England

Group exhibitions

• 2006 — The Present Time, Kovcheg Gallery, Moscow; "Nonactual art", Moscow Union of Artists exhibition hall, Moscow
• 2007 — Personal acquaintance (within the Parallel Programme of the 3rd Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art), Kovcheg Gallery, Moscow
• 2010 — The Dialogue. Pavel Nikonov and Young Artists, Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow
• 2010 — On the contrary, CCA Winzavod, Moscow
• 2010 — Art sanatorium, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2011 — Russian metaphysics. Italian objectivity. The beginning of the new century, Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow
• 2011 — The forms of life. Return to reality, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2012 — Combine. Retrospective (joint exposition with Egor Plotnikov), Heritage Gallery, Moscow
• 2013 — Horizons, CCI Fabrika, Moscow
• 2013 — Stanzas, Erarta Gallery, St. Petersburg
• 2013 — Strabag Art Award, Vienna, Austria
• 2014 — Desolation of landscape, a project by "Dialogue of Arts" magazine (Art.Ru Agency, Moscow; ART re.FLEX Gallery, St. Petersburg Stroganov Chambers, Usolye)
• 2014 — A Time for Dreams (Main Project of the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art), Museum of Moscow
• 2014 — Perception transfers. From analog to digital, CCA Sokol, Moscow
• 2014 — Landscape with the disappearance, VCCA, Voronezh
• 2014 — Fortune museum, MMOMA, Moscow
• 2015 — Metageography. Space – Image – Action, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2015 — No time, CCA Winzavod, Moscow (Special projects of the 6th Moscow biennale of Contemporary Art), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2015 — Russia. Realism. XXI century, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
• 2015 — Expanding Space, GES-2, Moscow
• 2015 — Sub observation, MMOMA, Moscow
• 2015 — Piece of Space Traversed by Mind, New Wing of Gogol Museum, Moscow
• 2015 — Fest, Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, Krasnoyarsk
• 2015 — Portrait Now! participants exhibition (Erarta, St. Petersburg; Frederiksborg Castle, Kopenhagen, Denmark; Ljungberg Museum, Ljungby, Sweden)
• 2016 — Always modern. Always contemporary. The art of XX—XXI centuries, ROSIZO State Museum Exhibition Centre, Moscow
• 2016 — Where Is Heaven on Earth, Erarta, St. Petersburg
• 2016 — Spatial Errors, GROUND Peschanaya Gallery
• 2017 — New Literacy, the Main project of the 4th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg
• 2017 — Noise of Time, Russian Contemporary Art from Erarta Museum, Maritime Centre, Kotka, Finland
• 2018 — 10/7. Collection Highlights / Display History, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow
• 2018 — Metageography: Orientalism and Dreams of Robinsons, Zarya Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok
• 2018 — Where will I be, Selected works from MMOMA Collection", Krasnoyarsk Museum Center, Krasnoyarsk
• 2018 — Art Art and Technology. Pros and Cons, the main project of the VIII International Tashkent Biennale of Contemporary, Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan, Tashkent
• 2019 — Gold, Moscow Contemporary Art Center Winzavod, Moscow
• 2019 — Metageography – Images of Space in the Era of Globalization, Pro art's Gallery, Kaluga
• 2019 — Orienteering and Positioning The Main Project of the 8th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary art, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2020 — Viral Self-Portraits, online exhibition, Museum of Modern Art (Ljubljana), Ljubljana, Slovenia
• 2020 — Generation XXI. The gift from Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin, Tretyakov gallery, Moscow
• 2021 — Kuzbass Now!, Tretyakov gallery, Moscow
• 2021 — Socialist Realism. Metamorphosis. Soviet Art 1927 – 1987, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2021 — "AU", Street Art Museum, Saint Petersburg
• 2021 — Moscow–Seoul: Common Ideas, Museum of Moscow, Moscow
• 2021 — Living Matter, Tretyakov gallery, Moscow
• 2022 — Things, Center for Contemporary Art Typography, Krasnodar
• 2022 — Thing. Space. Human. Art of the second half of the XX – early XXI century from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
• 2022 — Art for Sanity: Reverse Perspective of War, MANYI—Kulturális Műhely, Budapest, Hungary
• 2022 — Overwhelming Majority?, Shtager gallery, London
• 2023 — 73—23, Pal Project Gallery, Paris, France
• 2024 — Brainwashing Machine, La Zona Gallery, Madrid, Spain
• 2024 — Breath 2024, CICA Museum, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo, South Korea
• 2024 — Cellule, Storage room, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
• 2024 — Brainwashing Machine, The Crypt Gallery, London, UK

Collections

• Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
• State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden
• Kalmar Art Museum, Sweden
• Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia
• Institute of Russian Realist Art, Moscow, Russia
• National Center for Contemporary Art, Russia
• Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
• Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Shining Center for Contemporary Art, Apatity, Russia
• I. P. Bardin Scientific and Technical Museum, Novokuznetsk, Russia
• Sfera Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
• Aksenov Family Foundation, Moscow, Russia
• Gallery of Contemporary Art Victoria, Samara, Russia

Awards

• 2015 — Kandinsky Prize long list (with the Inner Degunino project)
• 2017 – The Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award short list (with the White sea. Black hole project)
• 2017 — The Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award Special award of French Institute in St.Petersburg (with the White sea. Black hole project)
• 2017 — Kandinsky Prize long list (with the White sea. Black hole project)
• 2019 — Kandinsky Prize long list (with the project Psychozoic era)
• 2020 — The Artist of the Year by Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair
• 2020 — Winner of the Innovation Art Prize (with the Promzona project)
• 2021 — Kandinsky Prize short list (with the Promzona project)

Publications

• Diakonov, Valentin (2012). "Comfort Zone. Paintings by Pavel Otdelnov". Pavel Otdelnov. Neon Landscape. Catalog of the exhibition (PDF). Moscow: ArtRu Agency. p. 38.

• Kamyshnikova, Daria (2014). Internal Degunino. Pavel Otdelnov (PDF). Moscow: Triumph. p. 24. ISBN 978-5-6045889-1-8.

• Kulik, Irina; Otdelnov, Pavel (2015). Pavel Otdelnov. MALL (PDF). Moscow: Triumph. p. 44. ISBN 978-5-906550-56-9.

• Zatsepin, Konstantin (2016). Пространство взгляда. Искусство 2000 — 2010-х годов. Сборник статей [The Space of Vision. Art 2000 — 2010s. Digest of articles] (in Russian). Samara: Book Edition. p. 115. ISBN 978-5-9909189-4-8.

• Kamyshnikova, Daria; Zatsepin, Konstantin; Otdelnov, Pavel (2019). Pavel Otdelnov. PROMZONA (PDF). Moscow: Triumph. p. 192. ISBN 978-5-6041668-8-8.

• Otdelnov, P. A. (2019-12-26). "Художественный проект Промзона: история семьи как часть страны" [The Promzona Art Project: The Family Story as a Part of the History of the Country]. Philosophical Letters. Russian and European Dialogue. Philosophical Letters. Russian-European Dialogue (in Russian). 2 №4 (4) (2022/2023 ed.). Moscow: National Research University Higher School of Economics: 214–241/357. doi:10.17323/2658-5413-2019-2-4-214-241. Retrieved 2023-11-22.

• Mille, Daria (2020). "Trajectories of Modernization in Russia: Artists Recalibrating the Sensorium". In Latour, Bruno; Weibel, Peter (eds.). Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, MIT Press. pp. 378–379. ISBN 978-0262044455.

• Polyakova, Svetlana; Bobyleva, Marina; Otdelnov, Pavel (2021). Pavel Otdelnov. RUSSIAN NOWHERE. Catalog of the exhibition (PDF). Moscow: Triumph. p. 78. ISBN 978-5-6043737-7-4.

• Erofeev, Andrey (2021). CHA SHA. Moscow: Jart gallery.

• Zaks, L. A. (2021). "Эстетическое наших дней: новая феноменология" [The Aesthetic of our Times: a New Phenomenology] (PDF). Koinon. Philosophical Letters. Russian-European Dialogue (in Russian). 2. № 3 (3) (Koinon ed.). Yekaterinburg: Liberal Arts University – University for Humanities Ural Federal University: 44–66. doi:10.15826/koinon.2021.02.3.027. Retrieved 2023-11-22.

• Polyakova, S. V. (2021). Skvortsov, Lev (ed.). "Русское Нигде как пространство семиозиса: к истории одной выставки" [Russian Nowhere as a Space of Semiosis] (PDF). Human Being: Image and Essence. Humanitarian Aspects (in Russian). 1 (49). Moscow: INION RAN. Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University: 146–164. doi:10.31249/chel/2022.01.08. Retrieved 2023-11-22.

• Reviakin, Sergei; Lucie-Smith, Edward (2022). Russian Art in the New Millennium. Unicorn Publishing Group. p. 256. ISBN 978-19-13491-98-7.

• Otdelnov, P. A. (March 2023). Mörner, Ninna (ed.). Making of an Art Project: Ringing Trace (PDF). Ecological Concerns in Transition: A Comparative Study on Responses to Waste and Environmental Destruction in the Region (2022/2023 ed.). Stockholm: Södertörn University, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES). pp. 59–64/222. ISBN 978-91-85139-14-9. Retrieved 2023-11-22.

• Arutyunyan, Anna; Egorov, Andrey (2024). Guerin, Frances; Szcześniak, Magda (eds.). "Personal Traces in the Soviet Industrial Aftermath. Pavel Otdelnov's Promzona and Haim Sokol's Paper Memory Exhibitions in Moscow" (PDF). Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 243–266. doi:10.5117/9789048560097_ch09. ISBN 978-90-4856-009-7. Retrieved 2024-08-05.

• Otdelnov, Pavel (2024). "A Critical Juncture". In Piters-Hofmann, Ludmila (ed.). What Is to Be Done? Art Practice, Theory, and Promotion in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia (PDF). Berlin: Logos Verlag. pp. 165–172. ISBN 978-3-8325-5863-5.

Gallery

• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Shopping mall. 2013
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. P-44. 2014
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Ark. 2013
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Stonehenge. 2013
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. No Flights Today. 2015
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Wall of Fame. 2015-2020
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Group photo. 2017
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. 56.2354828 43.5809789. 2015
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Ruins. Passage. 2017
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Ruins. #3. 2016
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Hazardous area. 2018
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Waste sorting. 2020
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Zhuten. 2020
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Garages. 2020
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Sphere. 2021
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Techa. 2021
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Birch grove. 2021
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Karyotype. 2021
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Relocated. 2021
• 
  Pavel Otdelnov. Repository. 2021

External links

• Official website
• Website of the artist's project Promzona
• Pavel Otdelnov included in the list of the Best contemporary Russian artists (ARTEEX)
• Pavel Otdelnov in the website of the Russian Investment Art Rating 49ART