Pavel Otdelnov

Otdelnov's works from his student years are marked by the influence of the Soviet painting of the 1920s and 1930s.

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.

Pavel Aleksandrovich Otdelnov (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.

Pavel Otdelnov was born in the town of Dzerzhinsk Nizhny Novgorod Region, a major cluster of the Soviet chemical industry.

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.

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.

His works of the 2000s explore the formal aspects of painting: the properties of colors and materials, interrelation of dimensions, and unconventional compositions.

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.

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 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.

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.''

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.

Alongside the well-known abstraction of post-Soviet outskirts, these are the elements that compose Otdelnov's work in the early and mid-2010s."

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.

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.

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."

Otdelnov seeks to rethink the painting's status and engage it not as a self-sufficient medium but as a part of installations.

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.