EVA NIELSEN

Eva Nielsen’s paintings are at once cinematic, architectural and geological: fragments of built environment, desolate landscapes and utopian architecture are interwoven in her compositions through superimposed layers of opacity and transparency. Multiple scales and perspectives coexist, negate and displace one another in the dynamic indeterminacy of vanishing lines and fragmented projections, focusing the eye and the mind of the viewer simultaneously on the material density of the painting itself and on the affective matter of contemporary experience. 

The artist has consistently focused her gaze on the interstitial zones of suburbia as liminal non-places, remnants of once utopian projections: landscapes in motion seen through obstructed windows and grids, empty playgrounds, fragments of infrastructure, abandoned wooden sheds and secondary homes. Combining screen-printing techniques with oil, acrylic and ink on canvas, Nielsen’s process is one of consecutive fragmentations, concealments and revelations, positioning the final work as both reserve and residue in search for a pictorial fiction capable of holding multiple narratives and temporalities. Rendered through a superimposition of photographic capture, genre painting and techniques of assemblage, these subliminal landscapes offer a kaleidoscopic view over the modernist project in all of its contradictions and achieve a semblance of arrested motion. An alternative history of land use and built environment emerges, touches our most intimate memories and borders on the sublime.

Her carefully crafted fracturing and rearticulation of the silk-screened image in disjointed assemblages is set in tension with painted substrates, both revealing the screen within the image frame, and introducing a temporal dimension wherein the image reaches our eyes and minds like a time lapse video. In her most recent work, Nielsen completes the canvas by stretching a final layer of print on silk fabric, echoing the silk screen technique at the ground layer and augmenting the textilic quality of painting. She introduces peripheral memories, human figures and bodily postures into her vision of the periphery. Creases and folds left by the crumpled fabric that run through the paint appear like an additional substrate of vanishing lines distancing and re-arranging the image. The passage of time, through wear and tear, is at work here once again. Through all these substrates and microgestures, Eva Nielsen’s work culminates in a form of painting that exceeds its own medium, remains receptive to the viewers’ gaze and overflows into the imagination, as a metaphor for a topography of memory caught between fiction and materially inscribed traces.

Her work has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as Manifesto of Fragility - 16th Lyon Biennial (2022); Horizones, 23rd Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize Exhibition (Paris, 2022); Spring, Fondation Thalie (Bruxelles, 2021); Fragments Ephémères, Fondation Schneider (Wattwiller, 2020); Persona Grata ?, MAC VAL (Lyon, 2019), Paroxysm of Sublime, LACE (Los Angeles, 2019), Recto-Verso #2, Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, 2018); Visions, Plymouth Contemporary (Plymouth, 2017); Painting, She said, Museum of Rochechouart (Rochechouart, 2015) and Spring Exhibition, Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, 2013). In 2025, she is invited by the Musée de l'Orangerie (Paris) to take part in the exhibition “Dans le Flou” devoted to the theme of blur from the 1950s to the present day.

Eva Nielsen’s work has been recognized through multiple awards: LVMH Métiers d’Arts Prize and Residency Program (2021), Grand Prix de la Tapisserie d’Aubusson (2017), Art Collector Prize (2014) and Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts/Thaddaeus Ropac (2009) ; and shortlisted for AWARE Prize (2017), Salomon Foundation Residency Award (2015) and Prix Science Po for Contemporary Art (2010). Her work is part of several public and private collections including MAC VAL, FMAC, Museum of Rochechouart, CNAP, Fiminco Foundation, FRAC Auvergne and François Schneider Foundation. Her upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include SpectroGéographies (with curator Marianne Derrien), BMW Art Makers Prize Exhibition (Rencontres d’Arles & Paris Photo 2023); INTARSIA Residency Exhibition, LVMH Métiers d'Arts (Paris, 2022); Hypersurface, Le Point Commun, (Annecy, 2020); Evergreen Plaza, Maison Salvan (Labège, 2019); Hard Sun, The Cabin, (Los Angeles, 2017);  The Inventory, LKV, (Trondheim, 2012) .