Intarsia III : Eva Nielsen

In his text titled Strange and Familiar Beauty written for this exhibition, art historian and critic Barry Schwabsky insists on the “sculptural” quality of Nielsen’s work, suspended between motion and stillness, where the central figure is the animate artefact and the human figure is but a passing shadow : “Even in those cases, until now rather rare in Nielsen’s oeuvre, where the human image can be glimpsed, such as some from the 2022 Scope series—and despite the figure being caught in motion—the feeling is of freeze-frame, a sort of perpetual pause. More commonly, in Nielsen’s art, the “figure” is not a human being but a sculptural or even almost architectural construction of some sort, which dominates the field (...) Consider paintings such as Quasar, 2021, or Zoled, 2022, for instance, each with a central image of a spiraling steplike structure built (in the artist’s studio) out of wooden planks—an ascending form that, in the case of Zoled, has a kind of extreme contrapposto, unstable and dynamic, while Quasar’s protagonist looks more like a tornado made of boards. Neither one resemble any sort of living being and yet they appear, somehow, animate.”

Nielsen’s work embodies at once cinematic, architectural and geological layers, holding multiple potential narratives and temporalities. Her paintings operate as metaphors for a topography of memory caught between fiction and materially inscribed traces. Rendered through a superimposition of photographic capture, genre painting and techniques of assemblage, these subliminal landscapes offer a kaleidoscopic view over the modernist project in all of its contradictions and achieve a semblance of arrested motion. An alternative history of land use and built environment emerges, touches our most intimate memories and borders on the sublime.