Pam Evelyn

Portrait of Pam Evelyn, 2023, photo by Robert Glowacki © Pam Evelyn, courtesy Pace Gallery 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 (2020). She was awarded the Cass Art Prize in 2019. Evelyn’s work is held in the public collections of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy and Zabludowicz Collection, London. Recent solo and group exhibitions include The Reason for Painting , Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, United Kingdom (2023); Pam Evelyn: Amid Tall Waves , Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique, Paris (2023); New British Abstraction , Centre for International Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada (2023); Abstract Colour , Marlborough Gallery, London (2023); Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40 , Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2024); XXX, Studio Voltaire, London (2024); Online: Excavation: Macro to the Micro , Vortic Art (2024); A New British Modernity , Burberry Art Space, Seoul (2024); Alchemists , Pond Society, Shanghai (2024); and Abstraction (Re)Creation - 20 Under 40 , X Museum, Beijing, May 25–October 12, 2025. 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).