PAM EVELYN: FRAME OF MIND

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new, large-scale paintings by Pam Evelyn, titled Frame of Mind.

November 8 – December 21, 2024

In Frame of Mind, Evelyn’s first solo show in New York, she presents 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.

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.

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.