Russian contemporary artist (born 1979)
Pavel Aleksandrovich Otdelnov (Russian: , 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 Moscow Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts 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: 
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;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.
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.
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;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.
Early work.
Combine. Retrospective, 2007—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.
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;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