Eva Nielsen: Painting the Invisible – Duchamp Prize & Artistic Exploration

Paris-based artist Eva Nielsen is among four finalists selected for the prestigious 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize, a leading annual award recognizing French contemporary art . Nielsen, who was born in 1983 in Les Lilas, France, creates strikingly layered paintings informed by photography and diverse materials, and her work is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris as part of the prize exhibition. Her artistic practice ofen draws inspiration from the interplay between urban and natural landscapes, as explored in her recent exhibitions in Madrid, Lens, and Shanghai.

Paris-based artist Eva Nielsen is gaining attention as a finalist for the prestigious 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize, a major honor in the contemporary art world. Nielsen, born in 1983 in Les Lilas, France, creates hybrid paintings that blend photography with materials like latex, leather, and silk, often inspired by her travels through both natural and urban landscapes.

For the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, you decided to present your paintings in a rather theatrical form. Can you tell us more about that?

I’ve long been interested in the idea of stepping *inside* the medium itself, creating a kind of scopophilic impulse or a box of images that allows paintings or photographs to appear in layers. I felt a need for that kind of spatiality, and the invitation to the Marcel Duchamp Prize, along with the museum’s space, allowed me to explore it. I had begun developing printed paintings for the Lyon Biennale, where they were installed on scaffolding at the Fagor factories, but I’m increasingly obsessed with the principle of perspective—how images appear—and with the objects themselves, and the spectral quality of a camera obscura.

Does it feel like your work is becoming increasingly cinematic, with this desire to get to the heart of the painting?

I practice as a painter, but the more years go by, the more I realize my painting is linked to photography and projection. This hybridity is becoming increasingly dominant, and, indeed, in the way these images appear, I embrace those cinematic references. I’m moving towards immersion and a desire to go beyond the frame. For this exhibition, it’s almost about touching the very matrix of my work’s creation.

Eva Nielsen, RIFT , Oil, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas (aluminum frame), 300 x 370 x 5 cm, presented as part of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Would you say your work, with this desire to get to the heart of the painting, is becoming a kind of visual record of your experiences?

Absolutely, and when I was invited, I thought about a kind of “emergence” and the principle of digging into my own corpus. Cézanne said that one paints the same motif all one’s life, and it’s true that one always develops the same obsessions. Artists I admire, like Georgia O’Keeffe or Robert Rauschenberg, are perfect examples of that. Technique can then enhance thought.

    The painting fascinates me with its capacity for hybridity, porosity, and reinvention. I think it’s one of the most fluid mediums that exists and proves to be extremely malleable.

    

Do you still see yourself as experimenting?
I don’t have any grading when it comes to technique—I can experiment with latex, as I recently did, just as much as with oil paint. No material is more noble than another, and that multiplies the possibilities. My work generally focuses on “the invisible,” and often starts with trivial architectures. I say this without judgment, because, on the contrary, I’m very attached to what is everyday… what is right before our eyes but we no longer see it. This also allows me to pay attention to the mutation of architectures. I grew up and still live in the Parisian suburbs; my work is made of these crossings of cities, which intrinsically nourish my artistic vision, particularly through the prism of my own photographs, even though, when I was younger, I also collected images of various buildings and constructions. I go into the field, and sometimes I impose destinations I want to explore. I like this photographic survey of our surrounding ecosystem. In the suburbs, agriculture and highly urbanized areas coexist… there’s something both transient, ephemeral, and fleeting about it.

Eva Nielsen, Doline (Alluvions), 2023, oil, ink, acrylic, silkscreen on canvas, 30 x 190 cm (NIELS27513). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann.

You combine these urban structures with landscapes…
I’m fascinated, particularly in the context of the Grand Paris area, by these enormous chunks of concrete, which are like readymades in the urban space. I like that they are transient or then hidden in the ground, resembling “the invisible.” They create a kind of lens in the landscape, something scopophilic. I like to deconstruct reality and pay attention to what is on the edge or in the margins, without creating a hierarchy between subjects.
Can you sketch on location during your travels?
That can happen, but often I take road trips by car. I think more about the question of the landscape, which is always political, manipulated, and sometimes destroyed, therefore profoundly human, even when we talk about desolate or abandoned places.

Eva Nielsen, RIFT , Oil, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas (aluminum frame), 300 x 370 x 5 cm, presented as part of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann

You represent very few human beings in your works…
Man is present in a subtle way, and that reminds me of a residency I had in the Vercors, a place marked by the Resistance where the landscape is far from neutral. I walked a lot alone there, and a rather strange absorption phenomenon occurred in that action, which, without being a trance, leads to a loss of self. It feels good and brings up memories. I worked with leather and silk there, like a membrane, a film of the order of temporal memory or a veil over the landscape that brings a missing element. Until then, I was elaborating a silkscreen like a puzzle, but something spectral appeared. The printed image corresponds to the sensation of being able to approach photography, therefore reality, while being in the impression and projection.
How much free rein do you allow yourself in relation to the photographs you take?
I like to use my sources as catalogs, nourished by the many residencies of recent years during which I have amassed, collected, and created multiple combinations. This reminds me of the assemblage principle dear to Robert Rauschenberg and the complexity of the gaze of our experiences. We ourselves are made up of layers, like the landscape. The exhibition continues this reflection on the edge of the marshes that I began in Arles, where what is underwater joins what is of “the invisible,” especially when one thinks of the area near the Fos-sur-Mer factories. Then there emerges this ambivalence between the sea water that gnaws at the delta and the spring water. My painting is enormously linked to water and to this need for the edges that we have. The peripheries define the centers… it’s a concept we shouldn’t forget.

Eva Nielsen, Zoled II , 2022, oil, ink, acrylic, silkscreen on canvas, 375 x 275 cm (NIELS27509). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann (exhibition view: “In Between”, Kunsthaus Baselland, 2024).

You also combine these urban structures with landscapes…
I’m fascinated, particularly in the context of the Grand Paris area, by these enormous chunks of concrete, which are like readymades in the urban space. I like that they are transient or then hidden in the ground, resembling “the invisible.” They create a kind of lens in the landscape, something scopophilic. I like to deconstruct the real and pay attention to what is on the edge or in the margins, without creating a hierarchy between subjects.
Can you sketch on location during your travels?
That can happen, but often I take road trips by car. I think more about the question of the landscape, which is always political, manipulated, and sometimes destroyed, therefore profoundly human, even when we talk about desolate or abandoned places.

The four finalists for the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. © Paris Musées / Guillaume Blot

On view through February 22 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, Eva Nielsen is also
currently featured in the “Desen Focado” exhibition at Caixa Forum in Madrid,
and in the new Galerie du Temps at the Louvre-Lens.
Her work will also be shown at MAT, the Art Center of Montrelais, and at Icicle in Shanghai.

  
Exposition "Alluvion" de l'artiste Eva Nielsen à la Fondation Bullukian (Lyon) en 2025