Pam Evelyn: Frame of Mind
Cover of Pam Evelyn, 2024 © Pace Gallery
This monograph traces Pam Evelyn’s ongoing evolution, documenting the works from her first two exhibitions at Pace Gallery, "Handful of Dust" (2023) and "Frame of Mind" (2024). Illustrated with extensive details, Pam Evelyn includes a new text by Yuval Etgar and an interview by Matthew Higgs.
Installation View: Pam Evelyn: Frame of Mind 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 8 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
“It might appear as if Evelyn shies away from motifs in her paintings, at least as these are typically understood. Yet her engagement with the visible world, with symbolic references and narrative, is nevertheless fundamental to her painterly process.”
Pam Evelyn, Habit Pattern, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 200 cm × 500 16' 4-7/8"), overall 200 cm × each panel cm (78-3/4" × 250 cm (78-3/4" × 8' 2-7/16"), © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery
About Artist
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).
“I like to think about a clarity, a boiled-down and stripped-back delivery, a desire to find what is at the core. Shedding away any camouflage or finesse.”
Publication Details:
Text by Yuval Etgar. Interview by Matthew Higgs
Design by Fernando Gutierrez
2024
Hardcover
112 pages
12 x 11½ in.
ISBN: 9781948701372
Arte Realizzata did an exhibition showcase on this exhibition, which can be found here. The book can be preordered here. For more information about other titles from Pace Publishing, visit here; please visit Pace Gallery’s website here for more information about past, current, and future exhibits. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
