PAM EVELYN

Evelyn is known for abstractions that navigate complex terrains of energetic line, layered color, and dynamic forms, inspired by the texture of the everyday. Her process, which involves both instinctive creation and patient recalibration through looking and learning the work, unfolds across long periods, allowing her paintings to come into being on their own terms and in their own time. Evelyn’s compositions embrace this spirit of becoming rather than gesturing toward any fixed meaning. As Yuval Etgar has written, “Thematically as well as technically speaking, Evelyn’s paintings never sit still or settle in one place” but rather make use of “nonobjective abstraction as a method of departure from a contemplation of a visible subject to an expression of energy, direction, and movement.”

Evelyn created the works on view in The Wild Asphalt between London, where she lives and works, and the French Riviera, where she completed a residency in September 2026 at the “landscape-house” Dragon Hill. Her surroundings always inform her paintings, and in this new body of work her life in the city, in particular, played an important role. Evelyn has described the act of painting itself as being autobiographical, saying, “In my case the tensions in my touch and in my gestures are totally subservient to my circumstances, to how my day is going, for example, or to the context I find myself in, etcetera. I don’t tinker with this too much; I like to allow life to effect things. It’s a nuanced and subtle process, especially as nothing is being depicted or identified in my work.”

In the nine canvases featured in the exhibition, the verve and unpredictability of London’s urban environment translate into vivid oil paint that Evelyn layers, scrapes, and drips. Responding to recognizable city scenes—as indicated by titles such as Figure and Tower and Sun between Stone—these paintings distill and transform their visual and psychic effects, emulating the geometric reflections of sleek buildings in large windows, the grit of graffiti, or the glow of sunset on concrete. Here, Evelyn responds to both a certain anonymity as well as a mutual recognition between strangers, with shapes seeming to veer in different directions while coalescing into new forms. In all of these paintings, possibility bursts forth.

“I think there are many possibilities unfolding in my own paintings as well as evidence of a painterly handwriting that is becoming more familiar,” Evelyn has said. “I see this as the gradual result of repetition and long hours painting daily: a sort of familiarity occurs, and this, again, is something that’s probably inevitable but just as much a trap. . . . I never feel complacent in the studio; each painting always offers up new problems. I have an entanglement within my paintings that prevents me from seeing them so obviously.”

Evelyn’s continual artistic exploration is evident in her works on paper—all created in the past year—also on view in The Wild Asphalt. Composed with watercolor, acrylic, pastel, charcoal, ink, and collage, these works echo her larger compositions while engaging new formal strategies, introducing areas of greater transparency and negative space as well as elements of drawing and washes of color. The first exhibition at Pace to include Evelyn’s works on paper, The Wild Asphalt introduces viewers to new dimensions of the artist’s evolving practice.