Zode IV : la mer, horizon des possibles

Eva Nielsen paints with strength and conviction, she makes her large canvases her favourite terrain of expression, favouring line, collage, urban, material, and composes vast landscapes. Her semi-abstract paintings describe a world close to science fiction, utopian, with invasive monoliths.

Trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2009) with a passage through Central Saint Martins, London (2008), Eva Nielsen walks the asphalt of her native suburbs, camera and notebook as fellow travellers, curious about these peripheral landscapes and transition zones.

She creates a visual and memorial archive from which she draws to recompose new horizons. The question of line and strata taps the artist, as it does with many painters who tirelessly question themselves about infinity. In her luggage she collects small elements of the geography of cities, from a lock to a piece of wire mesh, to blocks of cement.

With silk-screen printing in particular, grain dominates in her painting which alternates with transparency and successive unveilings. Pictorialism is not far away, neither is street art. Eva Nielsen fragments reality, thus recomposing several strata of history and time. Sedimentation and stacking follow one another.
Large territories attract her. For Zode IV: la mer, horizon des possibles (Zode IV : the sea, horizon of possibilities), Iceland may have inspired the painter. Belonging to a series of eight large canvases, named after mysterious tales (Zanak, Laminac…), this seascape, in brushed oil and diluted with ink, is revealed under a screen-printed grid that encloses the painting. A window, however, offers a liberating breakthrough on the whole.

The decors and materials are hybrid, concrete and nature meet in a kind of visual escape. The sea appears here both as a projection and the suggestion of an elsewhere.

Eva Nielsen

Born in 1983, in France.
Lives and works in Paris (France).

Graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2009). Winner in 2008 of a Socrates scholarship that enabled her to study at Central Saint Martins in London, she won the Friends of Fine Arts/Thaddaeus Ropac Prize (2009), the Art Collector Prize (2014), and has since participated in several collective exhibitions in France and abroad: Mac Val, MMOMA (Moscow), Saint Andrew’s Abbey (Meymac), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Plymouth University, The Cabin (Los Angeles). His work has also been presented in monographic exhibitions in Paris (Jousse Entreprise), London (Selma Feriani) and Istanbul (The Pill).