Eva Nielsen
Born in 1983 in Lilas, lives in Paris.
In her successive sets of paintings – which belong to different technical and iconographic registers, which she methodically extends – Eva Nielsen pursues this research: to give substance to illusion, to visual mirages acting as much on the sight as on the intellect, on the surface of our orbits as in the depths of our eyes. These mirages take on changing appearances: sometimes, concrete architectures, proud of their monolithic forms, which fill the space, almost invading it, and whose immanent certainty builds the surrounding landscapes; elsewhere, kaleidoscopic genre scenes, layered with infinite folds or crossed with scars conducive to revelation, breaking the linearity of reality.
Eva Nielsen’s paintings offer a certain idea of vision: made of dazzling, shifting, cascading focus. Her subjects, voluntarily ungrateful, see the standard competing with the anecdotal and the unrecognizable, in a permanent back and forth between scales: the technical one of the plumbing kit as well as the bigger than life one of the Land Art artists. The close-up view, under the microscope, where the eye goes wild at the contact of elementary particles, alternates with the distant viewpoint, as if we were dominating the « pictorial battle », constantly restarted. Thanks to her open approach to the pictorial medium and her vision of painting as both a mental cosa and a sensitive window on the world, Eva Nielsen proposes traps for the gaze, receptacles in which to project ourselves, cognitive instruments against which to measure ourselves. The spaces thus frozen on the canvas are very often places of transition, of the in-between, anonymous thresholds where that circulates, where seem to float emotions, memories. Paintings like landscapes of memory, a visual memory rich with as many real images as mental and cinematographic apparitions.
Selection of personal exhibitions
2022
The Pill, Istanbul
Chroma, exhibition of the LVMH Métiers d’arts residence, Paris
2020
Hypersurface, Le Point commun, Annecy
2019
Dipolar, with Jennifer Caubet, cur. Sophie Vigourous, Jousse Entreprise, Paris
2018
Cosmovisions, with Marion Verboom, cur. Marianne Derrien, The Pill, Istanbul
Squam, with Marion Verboom, Material, Mexico
2017
Hard Sun, with Raphaël Barontini, The Cabin, Los Angeles
Unfolding Landscapes, cur. Nanda Janssen, Galerie Selma Feriani, Tunis
Les Fonds de l’œil, Jousse Entreprise, Paris
2016
Eva Nielsen, Espace art contemporain Camille-Lambert, Juvisy-sur-Orge
2014
Kodak Grey, Green Screen, with Rebecca Digne, Dominique Fiat, Paris
2011
Elvedon : Eva Nielsen/Marion Verboom, Maison des Arts de Grand Quevilly, Rouen
2010
Feedback, Dominique Fiat, Paris
2009
Florine Leoni/Eva Nielsen, Point de fuite, Permis de Construire, Toulouse
Selection of group exhibitions
2022
The Architecture of Transformation, cur. Sam Bardaouil & Till Fellrath, BNKR, Munich
2021
Expanse, Body, Space: Olivier Debré and Architectural Artists, cur. Isabelle Reiher & Marine Rochard, CCCOD, Tours
2020
Persona Grata ?, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine
2019
Paroxysm of Sublime, cur. Anna Milone, LACE, Los Angeles
2017
Painting says she (Chapter 2), cur. Julie Crenn & Annabelle Ténèze, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dole
2012
Babel, cur. Régis Cotentin, Palais des Beaux-arts, Lille
