PA Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in ART021 Shanghai 2026, November 11–14, with the Pseudomorphoses project.

A pseudomorph is a mineral found in a form alien to itself, assuming the guise of another mineral or organic object — a form that has outlived its own content and been filled with another’s. This project brings together three artists — Oleg Khvostov, Alisa Gorelova, and Andrey Syaylev — working in seemingly opposite directions. Khvostov’s “photoshopped,” geometrically precise landscapes, Gorelova’s entwined ecstatic bodies, and Syaylev’s post-ironic conceptualism together stage a kind of evolutionary theory of the image.

Oleg Khvostov captures the external attributes of landscapes — sometimes ones he has never seen himself — to construct geometrically and chromatically composed works that simulate that reality. Rather than depicting objects, he loosens our perception through familiar motifs. Unburdened by complex “readings” of meaning, the eye slides into what truly matters here: the pleasure of streamlined, idyllic forms that merely assume the appearance of recognizable things.

Alisa Gorelova, in turn, immerses herself in the physical mechanism of forming a “new body” — in the sense of something newly emerged, much as minerals form within mountains. Her works arise from a deeply personal approach to corporeality — ecstatic, mutable, genuinely alive — interwoven with various mythological motifs. All of this merges into a vitality-charged cluster of bodily and cultural experience, from which images grow.

Andrey Syaylev constructs a recursion of mimesis, of lost and acquired meanings. His Pseudomorphoses are assembled from found objects — among them old Soviet fur hats — combined with clay and chemical mixtures of metals and oxides. Reacting together, these elements progressively transform the headwear into fantastical, almost extraterrestrial masks for remarkable creatures. The result accretes a newly formed mythology, becoming a kind of artifact — an image of either a conspiratorial past or an improbable future.

The convergence of these three artists in a single space produces a culturological dialogue on the edge of conspiracy: how an image comes into being, how it takes on life within our cultural field, and how it may ultimately escape the author’s control — and begin, in turn, to direct that author.

Venue
Booth W07, Shanghai Exhibition Center

Artists
Oleg Khvostov, Alisa Gorelova, Andrey Syaylev

Exhibition Dates
November 11– 14, 2026

Website
https://pa-gallery.com/

Contact
info@pa-gallery.com

(Text and images courtesy of Artists and PA Gallery)