NEW YORK, NY.- Pace presents an exhibition of new, large-scale paintings by Pam Evelyn at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Running from November 8 to December 21, the show, titled Frame of Mind, spotlights works created by the artist during her recent residency in Cornwall, England. Marking Evelyn’s first-ever solo exhibition in the United States, this presentation is accompanied by a new catalog from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by art historian and curator Yuval Etgar.
Evelyn, who lives and works in London, is known for her expansive, abstract canvases that are densely layered, richly textured meditations on nature, the body, and materiality. Through her intuitive approach, the artist brings her complex compositions to life. Working in an array of scales and multi-panel formats, she imbues her paintings with emotional and psychological resonances, creating works that reflect the landscapes and textures of her inner world. She joined Pace’s program in 2023, and her works can be found in the collections of the Zabludowicz Collection in the English capital and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy.
In Frame of Mind, Evelyn’s first solo show in New York, she presents nine painting —including four monumental diptychs measuring some 16 feet wide—that she made this year in Cornwall. Physically removed from London’s frenetic energy, she spent several months completely alone with her work in an intense but also meditative state of focus. For Evelyn, time seemed to slow down during this period of isolation, and the paintings she produced simultaneously over the last year are fundamentally linked while entirely idiosyncratic. She built up these works as part of a rigorous physical process of layering and scraping paint and rearticulating forms, approaching each painting as a malleable, living being with no preordained contents or conclusion.
Moving fluidly between the elemental, the emotional, and the material in making these new paintings, Evelyn has made her most psychologically involved body of work yet. Rather than drawing direct inspiration from the Cornish landscape in which she was living, the artist used her natural surroundings to think through her work in the studio. Her resulting paintings, as her upcoming exhibition’s title suggests, are more “mindscapes” than landscapes, reflections of her own state of being.
Evelyn’s deep and nuanced engagement with art history is also evident in the paintings she shows in New York. In particular, the works of El Greco and Milton Avery were on her mind, especially as she worked to translate fleeting moments in the natural world into her compositions in a conceptual way, using the surrounding Cornish landscape as a space to pose questions about how painting is made.
Pam Evelyn (b. 1996, Surrey, United Kingdom) is a painter living and working in London. Her expansive, abstract canvases are densely layered, richly textured meditations on nature, the body, and materiality. Evelyn’s intuitive approach to painting translates her lived experience in the world onto the canvas, creating complex and vivacious compositions that brim with life. Her charged use of oil paints carefully layered, scraped, and rearticulated over several months—recalls the seething vitality of Abstract Expressionist painters while retaining a distinct and contemporary quality.
Made over long periods of time, Evelyn’s paintings move through countless iterations as she builds up and pares back her gestures in a dynamic tension between destruction and resolution, freedom and control, collapse and resurrection. The works appear like living, breathing canvases as the complexity of texture and temporality encased in the oil paint drips and sweats, obscures and reveals in turn. Indeed, Evelyn speaks of her paintings as quasi- sentient beings, positioning herself as their audience rather than creator as she allows them to dictate their direction.
Evelyn holds a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2019) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2020). She received the Cass Art Prize in 2019 and a prestigious residency at Porthmeor Studios, Cornwall in 2022. Evelyn’s work is held in the public collections of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy and Zabludowicz Collection, London. Recent exhibitions include Pam Evelyn: Spectacle of a wreck, Peres Projects, Berlin (2021); The Reason for Painting, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, United Kingdom (2023); Pam Evelyn: Amid Tall Waves, Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique, Paris (2023); New British Abstraction, Centre for International Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada (2023); Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); and XXX, Studio Voltaire, London (2024). In 2023, Evelyn was commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, London, to create two etchings to accompany the major exhibition, Action, Gesture, Paint Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 (2023).
