About the work

Pam Evelyn has created two polymer gravure etchings especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany Action, Gesture, Paint Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970, 9 Feb  - 7 May 2023.

The two editions, entitled Present and Away, 2023, feature the same image in two colour ways. Each printed from three polymer gravure plates, hand drawn by the artist, in five colours.

For Evelyn the prints comment on the direct nature of what it is to make, the push and pull of conviction and restraint. When making requires concentration and a deep commitment to the moment, followed by a rejection, to look away and consider what it is that exists in the gesture.

The prints were made by extracting forms from the artist’s drawings, using the repetition in print-making to create a familiarity with the initial mark and an attempt to then understand its very nature. Like Evelyn’s works on paper, the prints reveal the processes and impulses that underscore her paintings. Where Evelyn’s paintings are produced with many layers of application, inversely, her works on paper are stripped back, direct, immediate. Almost like a signature, or handwriting in an abstract language, the works on paper reveal a trace of their owner.

Evelyn refers to a quote by the artist Wook-Kyung Choi, whose work features in the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition.

“I am trying to express, visually, my experience of the moment lived. I hope to share, to communicate, and to create empathy for the experience”. - Wook-Kyung Choi 

Evelyn describes the medium of print as both fluid, an impression of the moment, but also fixed and repeated.  The importance of gesture in these prints is, for Evelyn, a response to the vitality of marks witnessed in the paintings exhibited in Action, Gesture, Paint, the handwriting in all paintings is bold, with impact and intention in each mark. 

About the artist

Pam Evelyn was born in 1996 in Surrey, UK. She lives and works in London, UK. Evelyn creates paintings that read as abstractions, however she incorporates a sensitivity and consideration towards figurative and landscape structures. As a painter she does not look to paint a varnished preserved view of the world, her focus is to let paint act from impulse, chance or even frustration, in an unedited display that rejoices and sometimes shakes.

Selected Exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include: Built on Clay, The Approach, London, UK and Spectacle of a wreck, Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany. Group exhibitions include Sabrina, curated by Russell Tovey, Sim Smith, London, UK; What You See Is What You Get, MASSIMODECARLO, Milan, Italy; Le coeur encore, The Approach, London, UK and Diaries of a Climate, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, US.