Pam Evelyn - New Now London Thursday, December 8, 2022 | Phillips

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  • “For me, colour is indulgent. When I work outdoors, I am witness to the harmony and disharmony of nature, the sudden changes in mood throughout a day.”
    —Pam Evelyn

    Executed in energetic and highly gestural strokes of vermillion, turquoise, and terracotta tones counterpointed by deeper eddies of midnight blue, Evening Rain is a strikingly atmospheric work by one of the most exciting emerging artists working in Britain today. Embracing the unpredictable and the mercurial, Pam Evelyn’s non-representational and highly intuitive compositions draw productively on the shifting patterns and raw power of the natural world while liberating themselves from any single meaning fixed in observable reality.

     

    In her studied interest in the visual qualities of light, weather conditions, and the passage of time across the day and through the seasons, Evelyn shares a robust dialogue with pioneers of painterly abstraction, her work recalling the vibrant palette and immediacy of Claude Monet’s late Nymphaeas and the gestural energy of Joan Mitchell’s compositions. Engaging with these legacies and reinvigorating this language for our own, contemporary moment, Evelyn’s work also belongs to broader conversations taking place amongst a diverse group of young female artists working in similarly non-representational modes, including Francesca Mollett, Sarah Jones, and Sarah Cunningham.

     

    A vibrant testament to these generative conversations around emotion, intuition, observation, and abstraction, Evening Rain was included alongside works by Cunningham and Mollett in the 2021 group exhibition Diaries of a Climate with Baert Gallery in Los Angeles. Foregrounding the materiality of paint in her sensitive and energetic translations of the natural world onto her canvases, Evelyn does not position herself as an omnipotent creator but as an observer, allowing herself to be challenged and surprised by the fundamental ‘unfamiliarity’ of painting, and the unexpected directions that her practice takes her. As the artist explains, ‘I really think the thing that keeps me on my toes and keeps the painting progressing is a result of not feeling like the author but in many ways the outsider. It is that feeling of being overwhelmed and feeling like painting is something that I am inadequate to do.’1

     

    In addition to her participation in several group shows, the new-to auction Evelyn has also received critical acclaim for her solo exhibitions Spectacle of a Wreck with Peres Projects in Berlin and Built on Clay at The Approach in London earlier this year. The artist is currently represented in the group exhibition Sabrina at Sim Smith Gallery in South London.

     

    1 Pam Evelyn, quoted in ‘“I don’t think painting should fit in…”: Tim Stoner in the Studio with Pam Evelyn’, Vardaxoglou, 22 April 2022, online.

    • Provenance

      Baert Gallery, Los Angeles
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Los Angeles, Baert Gallery, Diaries of a Climate, 9 March - 1 May 2021

1

Evening Rain

signed, titled and dated '"EVENING RAIN" 2020 "EVENING RAIN" 2020 PAM EVELYN' on the overlap
oil on linen
180.3 x 149.9 cm (71 x 59 in.)
Painted in 2020.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£8,000 - 12,000 ‡♠

Sold for £81,900

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now
+44 20 7901 7993
CGibbs@phillips.com

 

New Now

London Auction 8 December 2022