Eva Nielsen (born 1983) is a French-Danish visual artist who currently lives and works in Paris. She is known for mixing screen-printing techniques with oil and ink on canvas to create large paintings of contemporary suburban landscapes.[1][2]
Biography
After a BA in Modern History and Literature, Eva Nielsen received her MFA from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2009 with a one-year Socrates scholarship at Central Saint Martins, London (2008). Upon graduation she was the recipient of the Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts / Thaddeus Ropac Prize (2009) offering support and exhibition opportunities to young artists,[3] followed by the Art Collector Prize in 2014.[1] Her work has been shown in institutions such as Mac/Val, BNKR München, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Louis Vuitton Foundation, Kunsthal Charlottenburg. Her work was included in the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art: Manifesto of Fragility.
In subsequent years, Eva Nielsen's work has been short-listed for AWARE[4] and Meurice[5] prizes in 2017 and nominated for the 23rd Foundation Pernod Ricard Prize in 2022.[6] She was the recipient of LVMH Métiers d'Art Grant and Residency program in 2021, allowing her to work closely with artisanal silk and leather printing techniques.[7][8] In 2023, she was the recipient of BMW Group's Art Makers Program with French curator Marianne Derrien to create a series of works with a focus on the Camargue territory, with solo exhibitions at Rencontres photographiques d'Arles and Paris Photo (2023).[9][10]
Eva Nielsen uses silk-screen printing in her paintings in order to fragment and rearrange imagery from built environment, abandoned suburbia and desolate infrastructures.[12] The hybridity of her gesture has been described as both "human and mechanical, producing a sensitive complexity".[13] French art critic Anaël Pigeat wrote in 2012 that this contributes to a fragmentation on the painting's surface that acts "literally and metaphorically as projection surfaces, windows on the world both concealing and revealing".[14] In 2014 she was cited by Arts Magazine among the forerunners of the "new wave" in French painting centered around a shared "spectral quality".[15] According to art ciritic Clément Dirié, by using screen-printing, emphasizing negative space and blur, "Eva Nielsen offers traps for the eye, receptacles to project yourself into cognitive instruments against which we measure ourselves".[8] In her "Insolare" series, combining "optical and hydrogeological phenomena with exposure to light, a technique used in screen-printing",[16] Nielsen references "the incredible complexity of loss in nature".[17]
Exhibitions
Eva Nielsen's solo exhibitions include:
INSOLARE, BMW Art Makers Prize, Rencontres photographiques d'Arles & Paris Photo, Paris (2023)[17]