Pam Evelyn
b. 1996, United Kingdom
Pam Evelyn 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 (2022). She received the Cass Art Prize in 2019 and a prestigious residency at Porthmeor Studios, Cornwall in 2022. Evelyn’s work is included in the public collections of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy and Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom. Recent exhibitions include The Reason for Painting, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, United Kingdom (2023); and New British Abstraction, Centre for International Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada (2023). 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).