Pam Evelyn: Frame of Mind
Installation View: Pam Evelyn: Frame of Mind 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 November 8 – December 21, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new, large-scale paintings by Pam Evelyn at its 510 West 25thStreet gallery in New York. The exhibition opened on November 8th and will run to December 21, the show, titled Frame of Mind, will spotlight 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 will be accompanied by a new catalog from Pace Publishing, featuring an essay by art historian and curator Yuval Etgar.
Pam Evelyn, Bacchus, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 160 cm × 220 cm (63" × 86- 5/8") © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery
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.
Pam Evelyn, Curtain for Parade, 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
In Frame of Mind, Evelyn’s first solo show in New York, she will present nine paintings—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.
Pam Evelyn, Bigger Picture, 2024 PAINTING oil on linen 130 cm × 200 cm (51-3/16" × 78-3/4"), overall 130 cm × 100 cm (51-3/16" × 39-3/8"), © each panel Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery
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.
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
Evelyn’s deep and nuanced engagement with art history is also evident in the paintings she will show 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, Mourning Greys (detail), 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
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).
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
This exhibition opened on November 8th and will be on view until December 21, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too. The magazine highlights the book of the same title, which can be found here.
