EVA NIELSEN

Born in 1983, french-danish
Lives and works in Paris, France
https://www.eva-nielsen.com

Eva Nielsen received her MA with honors from the School of Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2009. In 2008, she won a Socrate grant which enabled her to study at Central Saint Martins in London. She then won the Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts/Thaddaeus Ropac (2009), the Prix Art Collector (2014), the Grand Prix de la Tapisserie d’Aubusson (2017), the LVMH Métiers d’Arts Prize in 2021, and has since taken part in several group exhibitions in France and abroad: MAC VAL (France), MMOMA (Moscow), Abbaye Saint André (France), Musée de Rochechouart (France), Plataforma Revolver (Lisbon), LACE (Los Angeles), Babel Art Space (Trondheim), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Plymouth University (England).

Her work has also been shown in monographic exhibitions in Paris (Galerie Jousse Entreprise), Istanbul (The Pill), Tunis and London (Selma Feriani) and is part of several public and private collections (MAC VAL, FMAC, Museum of Rochechouart, CNAP, Fiminco Foundation, FRAC Auvergne, François Schneider Foundation…).

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Suburban Odysseys or Sedimentary Painting

A work by Eva Nielsen is constantly at the border of something: on the edge of the territory, between centre and periphery, printed image and painting, abstraction and figurative art. From one horizon to another, from composition to subject, it is the landscape that predominates in Nielsen’s paintings and drawings. Inspired both by architecture and by the vestiges of architecture (modernist as much as Utopian), her gaze rests on what seems to be “out of sight” because the places that she transcribes only appear between the interstices of abandoned nature and industrial sites. Acting as topographer, observer and nomad, the artist experiences these changing territories by their expanse as much as by their exploitation. She knows these so-called “intermediary” spaces well, they are those of the Parisian region. Simultaneously personal and fictitious, this cartography has over time been shaped by both her Danish origins and her foothold in the suburbs. […] Faced with these abandoned spaces, a snow-covered landscape, a deserted suburban zone or children playing, Eva Nielsen examines these transient spaces and times with the elusive memories that form part of our daily lives.

[…] In these multiple visions of the landscape, she assembles, reconfigures and harvests fragments of reality, but something always interposes itself like a screen or a filter. In her use of printing, Eva Nielsen “traces the world” and “spoils” the painting by sublimating it. Representing the alteration of the places that she has roamed or infiltrated, these spaces of reconstruction, real of fake, scramble and disrupt our perceptions. Far from looking to imitate nature (abore all the way in which nature creates), the artist places her work beyond the nature/culture dualism inherited from the 19th century, transforming the landscape into an «alternative history» of the land’s development. […]

Marianne Derrien
Eva Nielsen’s Monograph, 2019

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