Pavel Aleksandrovich Otdelnov (Russian: Павел Александрович Отдельнов, born on 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] 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.

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.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.

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.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 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 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.

[40][41][42][43][44][45] 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.

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.

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.Pavel Otdelnov is aware that direct replication of reality is impossible, so he uses another optic – machine vision and collective human intelligence.

[48][13][49] 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.

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.

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.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.

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.

[66][67][68][69][70][71] 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.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.

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, and naked human figures drowning in the snow.

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.

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.