The pop/off/art gallery presents Vladimir Potapov's exhibition "What doesn't happen, we'll dream about," marking the artist's fourth solo project at Winzavod. The exhibition will bring together works from the artist's series, executed in his signature melting painting technique. The first works from this project were shown in 2025 at the Frank Taal Gallery (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and the exhibition at pop/off/art will feature over 10 new works created by Potapov in the summer of 2026.

Monumental paintings, in which historical monuments and palace chandeliers appear inside ordinary apartments, loom over city blocks and come into direct contact with everyday life. Initially frightening and impossible images gradually cease to be perceived as exceptions. They become part of a familiar space—a mundane backdrop that a person encounters morning after morning.

The exhibition's title is based on the paradoxical transformation of the unrealized into the experienced: what cannot happen in reality can exist in the imagination, memory, or dream. The dream in the title, however, is not the opposite of everyday life, but its continuation. The artist addresses one of the paradoxes of human perception: the ability to quickly adapt to environmental changes. Just as in a dream the impossible seems natural, so in the world depicted by Potapov, the incredible gradually becomes part of the ordinary.

Each work is complemented by video art depicting the process of image creation, through the superposition of two realities: the top layer dissolves, revealing what lies beneath, and the pictorial form finds itself in a state of constant flux. Collected together, the works capture the moment when the anomalous becomes the norm. In this process, the artist is interested not so much in the catastrophe itself or the radical shift in reality, but in its subsequent assimilation—the gradual routinization of events, as a person continues to live a familiar life within an already changed world.

Yulia Tikhomirova, art historian, critic, and curator, will author the accompanying text for the project. The exhibition will also feature a presentation of Vladimir Potapov's "Inside" series catalog. It will be the first catalog raisonné from Popov Art Publishing House dedicated to a specific cycle by the artist and will include art criticism articles by Yulia Tikhomirova, Andrey Miziano, and Sergey Popov, as well as texts by the artist himself.

Vladimir Potapov is a Moscow-based artist, curator, theorist, and promoter of contemporary art. He is known for his conceptual work with painting, which has resulted in a number of series that have problematized the surface, space, and materiality of painting today. One of the main themes in Vladimir Potapov's art is the rethinking of post-Soviet society.