Opsine: Eva Nielsen

T H E  P I L L ® is thrilled to host Eva Nielsen’s solo show Opsine in Paris this fall, in parallel to Art Basel Paris and the artist’s participation at the survey exhibition Landscape Painting: From Monet to Hockney (1890-2026) at Musée Marmottan, Paris. Opening on October 17, Opsine gathers Nielsen's latest large-scale polyptych paintings alongside a selection of new works exploring vision and memory as embodied processes.

The exhibition takes its title from opsins, photosensitive proteins found in the retina and other living organisms, which initiate the biological process through which light is converted into a signal. Taking this microscopic mechanism as a point of departure, Opsine explores vision as a material and temporal process, through which light, matter and living bodies continually produce and transform the visible world. Nielsen’s new works move between radically different scales — from the cellular to the geological and planetary — bringing the structures of the eye into relation with landscapes shaped by water, mineral sedimentation and atmospheric change. Circles evoke cells, eyes, photographic lenses or planets; membranes become glass, silk, skin or painted surfaces. These shifts in scale do not seek equivalence between disparate forms, but rather establish relations between them, suggesting a world in which the boundaries between living and inert matter remain unstable.

In the titular polyptych Opsine, this instability acquires an optical and almost holographic dimension. Forms advance, disappear and return; contours double; colours migrate across an aqueous and at moments almost psychedelic spectrum. The image no longer appears as something simply received by the eye, but activates vision as a material process with its own limits, delays and residues. Retinal persistence — the capacity of an image to remain momentarily visible after its source has disappeared — finds echoes in geological sedimentation, photographic chemistry and memory. Processes belonging to radically different scales and durations are brought alongside one another, momentarily held in relation by the painting.

Eva Nielsen’s paintings are at once cinematic, architectural and geological: fragments of built environment, desolate landscapes and utopian architecture are interwoven in her compositions through superimposed layers of opacity and transparency. Multiple scales and perspectives coexist, negate and displace one another in the dynamic indeterminacy of vanishing lines and fragmented projections, focusing the eye and the mind of the viewer simultaneously on the material density of the painting itself and on the affective matter of contemporary experience.

Combining screen-printing techniques with oil, acrylic and ink on canvas, Nielsen’s process is one of consecutive fragmentations, concealments and revelations, positioning the final work as both reserve and residue in search for a pictorial fiction capable of holding multiple narratives and temporalities. In her most recent work, Nielsen introduces peripheral memories, human figures and bodily postures into her vision of the periphery. Creases and folds left by the crumpled fabric that run through the paint appear like an additional substrate of vanishing lines, distancing and rearranging the image. The passage of time, through wear and tear, is at work here once again. Through all these substrates and microgestures, Eva Nielsen’s work culminates in a form of painting that exceeds its own medium, remains receptive to the viewers’ gaze and overflows into the imagination, as a metaphor for a topography of memory caught between fiction and materially inscribed traces.

Eva Nielsen (1983, Les Lilas) holds an MFA from Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux arts de Paris (2009) with a year of study at Central Saint Martins, London.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Diluvium, ICICLE, (Shanghai, 2026), Alluvion, Fondation Bullukian-Fontevraux (Lyon, 2025); SpectroGéographies (with curator Marianne Derrien), BMW Art Makers Prize Exhibition (Rencontres d’Arles & Paris Photo 2023); INTARSIA Residency Exhibition, LVMH Métiers d’Arts (Paris, 2022); Hypersurface, Le Point Commun, (Annecy, 2020); Evergreen Plaza, Maison Salvan (Labège, 2019); Hard Sun, The Cabin, (Los Angeles, 2017); The Inventory, LKV, (Trondheim, 2012). Her work has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as 25th Marcel Duchamp Prize Exhibition, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (Paris, 2025);  DESENFOCADO, Caixa Forum (Madrid, 2025); Gallery of Time, Musée du Louvre Lens (Lens, 2024); Manifesto of Fragility - 16th Lyon Biennial (2022); Horizones, 23rd Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize Exhibition (Paris, 2022); Spring, Fondation Thalie (Bruxelles, 2021); Fragments Ephémères, Fondation Schneider (Wattwiller, 2020); Persona Grata ?, MAC VAL (Lyon, 2019), Paroxysm of Sublime, LACE (Los Angeles, 2019), Recto-Verso #2, Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, 2018); Visions, Plymouth Contemporary (Plymouth, 2017); Painting, She said, Museum of Rochechouart (Rochechouart, 2015) and Spring Exhibition, Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, 2013).
Eva Nielsen was a Marcel Duchamp Prize nominee in 2025. Her work has been recognized through multiple awards: LVMH Métiers d’Arts Prize and Residency Program (2021), Grand Prix de la Tapisserie d’Aubusson (2017), Art Collector Prize (2014) and Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts/Thaddaeus Ropac (2009) ; and shortlisted for AWARE Prize (2017), Salomon Foundation Residency Award (2015) and Prix Science Po for Contemporary Art (2010). Her work is part of several public and private collections including MAC VAL, FMAC, Museum of Rochechouart, CNAP, Fiminco Foundation, FRAC Auvergne and François Schneider Foundation.