Eva Nielsen

The ICICLE Cultural Space in Shanghai opens its new artistic season with Diluvium, the first solo exhibition in Shanghai by Eva Nielsen, one of the most distinctive voices of the contemporary French art scene and a nominee for the 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp.

Co-curated by Marianne Derrien and Myriam Kryger, the exhibition, presented as part of the festival Croisements, brings together a selection of recent works alongside new pieces conceived specifically for this presentation. The project unfolds from exterior to interior, beginning with a mural intervention on the façade of the ICICLE building, before extending into the gallery space.

Working across painting, photography, and silkscreen, Eva Nielsen develops a hybrid practice grounded in processes of layering, fragmentation, and erosion. Her works depict unstable landscapes, interstitial zones, and fragments of infrastructure, where human figures intermittently appear only to dissolve into their surroundings. Through superimpositions of images, translucent materials, and shifting scales, the works generate a perceptual experience marked by instability and continuous transformation.

The title Diluvium evokes both geological sedimentation and the sudden violence of the flood. This tension between slow accumulation and imminent erasure lies at the core of Nielsen’s practice. Images emerge and recede, surfaces oscillate between transparency and opacity, and no single viewpoint prevails. Painting becomes a space of immersion rather than representation, an environment to be traversed.