BRUSSELS.- From April 23 to July 26, La Verrière, the exhibition space of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in Brussels, will host the exhibition “Aster”, dedicated to artist Eva Nielsen. Recently nominated for the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize, Nielsen presents several new artworks. Focusing on her painting, this exhibition extends far beyond, bringing together three other figures with diverse practices: sculptor Charlotte Posenenske; object-sculpture designer Arnaud Eubelen; and the landscape agency Etablissement. This exhibition offers a journey to discover a major painter on the contemporary European scene, from suspended territories to stellar horizons.

The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès invites the public to discover Eva Nielsen’s first international solo exhibition. A French-Danish artist who grew up in the suburbs east of Paris, Nielsen is fascinated by wasteland landscapes, peripheral spaces, and the atmosphere of these environments. She uses these margins as the framework for her paintings, constructing her canvases from images that she mishandles, reduces and decomposes, playing with perspective.

Combining painting, photography and screen printing, Nielsen merges the painter’s gesture with mechanical techniques. Through this practice, she questions our perception of images, our view of the landscape and the standardisation of the objects that surround us. At La Verrière, she presents three large-format, never before-seen canvases created specifically for the exhibition, evoking a new, cosmic, enigmatic horizon.

The eighth exhibition curated by Joël Riff for La Verrière, “Aster” explores the tensions between hand and machine, built space and nature, proximity and distance. Following the principle of the ‘augmented solo’ initiated in 2023, Joël Riff has also invited three figures with diverse profiles and complementary practices. The dialogue with this diversity opens up new avenues for understanding Eva Nielsen’s painting. In the space, an abstract minimalist sculpture by artist Charlotte Posenenske resonates with the paintings. The seating and lighting by designer Arnaud Eubelen echo the industrial world, and the text written by the Brussels- and Paris-based agency Etablissement sketches out another view of Eva Nielsen’s work: the making of landscapes today.

Founded in 2000, La Verrière is one of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ four exhibition spaces. As part of the Foundation’s programmes to support contemporary creation, artists are invited to embrace the space with the possibility of producing new works.

“ASTER”

Eva Nielsen radiates. She slices through the skies of her paintings, creating openings that draw us ever further in. In other words, she expands the sense of vastness. For over fifteen years, she has been experimenting with the dimensions of space, striking surfaces with mechanical effects and gestural delights. Through this, the painter asserts her ability to depict landscapes, and therefore the world, in all its strata, from the technical to the sentimental. While others may have invented perspective before her, she pierces it, stretches it, turns it upside down, definitively. The vanishing point is no longer an egotistical escape, but a possibility nestled beyond the horizon. Aware of the eye’s mechanisms, she understands how whatever appears on a canvas will imprint itself indelibly on any retina, following an inescapable, fiercely physical symmetry. Because light touches. And so, it is us, entirely, that light shapes when the artist constructs her compositions. Her science of the sun, pushed into extreme contrasts by the silkscreen and sensually modelled by oil, shatters empty spaces in a Big Bang that is renewed each time. This powerful radiance, ping-ponging between two bodies, is called the gaze.

Eva Nielsen fully immerses herself in the production process. Picture her in her studio, treading horizontally across stretches of canvas, leaving traces of handling and the invaluable grime of her movements, creating the graphic puzzle that will become the skeleton of her paintings.

If there is a stretcher at the back, there is also this skeleton at the front. Sometimes, an ossuary. A meticulous masking technique protects the framework, only to reveal it once the brushstrokes have settled. A dynamic of sedimentation runs through every layer of her process. Among the many inversions she performs is the fundamental shift from floor to wall, from a position where things move to one where they are fixed. A performative dimension permeates the work, sharing in an intense magnetism the challenge of producing each piece. Clearly, the artist ventures into the experience of the expanses she immortalises, wandering over these lands and clouds until she loses herself in them completely. The objective is achieved. It’s dizzying, and yet it holds.

The exhibition “Aster” shares objects in space. The immediate definition of any celestial body instantly draws us into the vastness of the cosmos where aeroliths float, simultaneously awakening the eye’s natural tendency to break down details within reach in an attempt to grasp the whole. This spatial arrangement simply defines the principle of an exhibition. Rays circulate. Constellations take shape. To make her constellations, the painter splatters. This astral atmosphere encourages a deliberate distancing, a step back to gain a broader perspective. The volume of La Verrière allows for this. In contrast to this dual dynamic, the formats press their covering against our faces. We’re almost nose-to-canvas. The archaeological aspect and radiographic power nourish a vision that penetrates layers. We embrace the erosions so dear to the artist, who excavates. And it is towards the two infinities that her analogies stretch, between the eye and the planet, the globe and the globe, the orbit and the orbit, the revulsion and the revolution.

Eva Nielsen handles obstacles and breakthroughs, always managing to avoid trapping us on one side. By cutting and framing, she takes aim. But who truly knows, when we collide with one of her grids, the vastness of the space from which we are looking? If there is a cage, we are certainly outside it. This breath asserts a stance in the face of uniformity. When something radiates, anything is possible.

There’s a fascinating ricochet that each work invites us to make, at once radiant and impressed, through an active exchange between the viewing organ and the surface, two photosensitive films in communication. Observation is inherently subversive. So, when a mental or geological boundary is discerned, we have already surpassed it. Any architecturally designed framework allows the vastness to be represented. This reversal unsettles perception, lifting us from shifting sands. By showing subjects from their reverse, their edges, they open up. Hence, the gaping universe that draws us in. The assurance of the painting propels us forward. Immediacy, gravity, and authenticity reinforce its existential power. Ultimately, what the artist depicts are always, without exception, images of freedom.

The exhibition “Aster” brings this flagrancy to life.

For Eva Nielsen’s first institutional solo show outside France, the artist has produced a series of new paintings centred around an ambitious triptych, both in terms of scale and concept. Its dimensions correspond to the maximum size allowed by her current studio, the contours of which will be palpable within La Verrière. These new works embrace a striking austerity, laying bare their very core. In the same spirit, a deliberately small community shares this directness, further intensifying the experience of painting with an even firmer grounding. A sculpture by pioneering artist Charlotte Posenenske historicises a critique of standardisation. This industrial reality informs the furniture designs of Arnaud Eubelen, whose objects emerge from discarded materials. The manifesto lexicon of the Etablissement agency helps reshape our perspective on our surroundings. As well as raising awareness of the interiors and peripheries, this is an experience that forges a lucidity capable of tackling both the near and the far.

This sense of awe keeps us standing.

-- Joël Riff

EVA NIELSEN

Eva Nielsen leaves a lasting imprint on painting. Born in 1983 in the Paris suburbs, where she still lives, she trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, graduating in 2009. She has been teaching there for three years, in an environment where artistic friendships continue to shape her practice. With a steady flow of at least one solo show a year since graduating, and numerous group shows across Europe, her practice is fundamentally pictorial, while incorporating other mediums. She has been nominated for the 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp.

This year in France, she is the subject of solo exhibitions at the Fondation Bullukian in Lyon and Abbaye de Fontevraud. Her past solo presentations have been at Peter Kilchmann gallery in Zurich, The Pill in Istanbul, Selma Feriani in Tunis and London, and Jousse Entreprise and Dominique Fiat in Paris. She has also exhibited at Le Point Commun in Annecy, Maison Salvan in Labège and Camille Lambert in Juvisy- sur Orge, as well as Les Rencontres d’Arles and Paris Photo.

Eva Nielsen has participated in numerous group exhibitions, primarily across Europe, including in France at Louvre-Lens, Musée d’Orsay and Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris; Musée Jean Lurçat in Angers; Les Abattoirs in Toulouse; Biennale de Lyon; Musée Départemental de la Tapisserie in Aubusson; Fondation Schneider in Wattewiller and MAC VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine.

She has also exhibited in Belgium at Fondation Thalie in Brussels and Independent Brussels; at Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, Switzerland; at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark and LKV in Trondheim, Norway. In the United States she has exhibited at Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas and LACE in Los Angeles.

Her work can be found in the collections of FNAC, FMAC Paris, FRAC Auvergne, MAC VAL, Musée de Rochechouart as well as the collections of Emerige, Fiminco, Schneider and Thalie foundations, and MOCA Los Angeles.

Nielsen has received several major awards, including the 2009 Amis des Beaux-Arts de Paris, the 2014 Art Collector prize, the LVMH Métiers d’Arts 2021 prize and the BMW Arts Makers 2023 prize. She was nominated for the Audi Talents Awards in 2009, the Sciences Po prize for Contemporary Art in 2010, the Salomon prize in 2015 and the AWARE prize in 2017. Her work and artistic vision are frequently referenced in print media and on the radio.

Eva Nielsen and Joël Riff have been collaborating for over fifteen years, with exhibitions in Saint-Denis, Paris, Alfortville, Moly-Sabata, Marseille and Brussels. They have also co- authored a dozen texts including an interview published in the artist’s first monograph by Manuella Éditions in 2019.