Eva Nielsen

Thanks to her open approach of the pictorial mediumi and her vision of painting as a medium and as a window of sensation, open onto the world, Nielsen offers traps for the eye, receptacles to project yourself into, cognitive instruments against which we mesure ourselves. The spaces thus fixed onto the canvas are most often places of transition, in-between spaces, anonymous thresholds where something circulates, where emotions and memories seem to float. Paintings as landscapes of memory, a visual memory as rich with real images as with mental apparitions.

Eva Nielsen (b. 1983 in Les Lilas, France. Lives and works in Paris) graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2009 followed by a scholarship at the Central Saint Martins School in London, UK. Before engaging in her visual arts education, Nielsen was a student of Modern Languages and European Studies at La Sorbonne in Paris.

In her collage-like works that blur the boundaries between painting, photography and screen-printing, Eva Nielsen explores the possibilities of these mediums to create reconstructed perspectives of reality. Her images cannot be be classified as photography or painting as they combine both media. The constructions of her images are artificial and nonsensical, just as photography and painting are used in a way that goes against their conventional relationship. Due to its technical nature that makes it a mechanical recording of what is in front of the lens, photography is considered a direct document of reality. Painting, on the other hand, offers a total freedom of expression - of touch, form and colour - which distances itself from the model to the point of being able to do without it altogether in the case of abstraction. Nielsen’s works conjure utopian and timeless landscapes from a mix of photographs, personal memories, and dreamlike idylls. She overlays these landscapes with industrial structures, particularly components of underground waste and water systems that frame and mediate the underlying images. Psychically situating her works at various crossroads where subterranean and open-air vistas, imagined and existing spaces, as well as urban and rural ecosystems meet, Nielsen seeks out intermediary realms, where new ways of seeing and experiencing have the opportunity to emerge. The image thus plays with a shift between the manifest and the occult, between enigmatic resemblance (to a visible model) and distanced imitation (of an archetypal model).

Eva Nielsen’s work has been exhibited at public institutions including: Mac/Val, France; LACE, Los Angeles; Plataforma Revolver, Portugal; BNKR, Munich; Perm Museum, Russia; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Palais Pisztory, Bratislava among others. In 2009, she was awarded the Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts Prize and in 2014 the Art Collector Prize. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze, Artforum, Telerama, Art Press, Kunstbeeld, Le Monde and is featured in numerous public and private collections including: the Mac/Val, the Musée de Rochechouart, the Musée des Beaux-arts de Paris, The Fiminco Fondation (all in France), as well as in the MOCA, Los Angeles, USA. In 2021, Eva Nielsen was the laureate of the LVMH Métiers d'Arts prize. In 2022, she was nominated for the 23rd Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize "Horizones" and participated in the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art: Manifesto of Fragility in Lyon, France. In 2023, she is the laureate with Marianne Derrien of the BMW Art Makers Prize.

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