Echoing the architecture of La Verrière, whose skylight opens up the exhibition space to the sky above, Eva Nielsen's canvases are marked by unexpected openings that redefine the contours of the world that she shows us. Fascinated by wastelands and peripheral spaces, the artist, who was born in France in 1983, plays with the codes of perspective and with vanishing points that hover just beyond the horizon. The vertiginous result is accentuated by her work with light, an ineffable energy that she channels as a material through her practice, which combines painting, photography and screen printing.
“Aster” is Eva Nielsen's first solo exhibition outside her native France. It features a series of new canvases and centres on an ambitious triptych whose format was determined by the dimensions of the artist's studio. For Joël Riff, “these new works embrace a striking austerity, laying bare their very core.” The enigmatic canvases are punctuated by objects that encourage us to take a step back to observe the contrast between the architectural forms and the vast spaces depicted by the artist. These “images of freedom”, in the words of the exhibition’s curator, promise to interrogate and shift the ways in which we look at the landscape.
Three further artistic approaches help us to apprehend this pictorial cosmos. A minimalist abstract work by the pioneering German sculptor Charlotte Posenenske (1930-1985) offers a critique of standardisation. Belgian artist Arnaud Eubelen, born in 1991, meanwhile presents a series of seats and light fixtures created using discarded materials. Finally, the landscape agency Etablissement, founded in 2015 by the architect Annabelle Blin and operating between Paris and Brussels, uses the text in the publication accompanying the exhibition to invite us to see our surroundings anew.
A major figure on the contemporary European art scene, Eva Nielsen regularly exhibits in France and abroad. Her work features in major French public and private collections, as well as at the MOCA Los Angeles. She is one of four artists nominated for the 2025 edition of the Prix Marcel Duchamp.
