Lucite

Eva Nielsen gets the Cité’s Great Prize 2016 with Lucite, a tapestry proposition in trompe l’oeil style, which plays with a tension between the monumental and the intimate

After going through London’s Central Saint Martins and graduating the Beaux-Arts in Paris, Eva Nielsen is a promising artist from the new French pictorial scene. Represented by Jousse in Paris, Selma Feriani in Tunis and London and The Pill in Istanbul, the young French-Danish is interested in the theme of the interlacing. Her plastic art work is a work of layers: from photographs, Eva Nielsen takes the images over by intervening in successive layers, successive frames of silkscreen printing, application of paint or ink.

For the Cité’s 2016 call for creation, Eva Nielsen proposed a project in trompe l’oeil style. From the name of an illness preventing the confrontation with day light and obligating the ill persons to protect themselves from the sun under a hessian, the work Lucite comes from a research where the artiste superposes the impression of a mosquito net on top of a landscape picture. Planned to measure 2,20 meters large and 3 meters high, the work plays with the tapestry’s monumental dimensions and the intimate perception of the landscape through the textile framework.

While she works her images in successive layers, the realization of a tapestry allows her to transcend her artistic signature by touching directly the material which she prints since several years. As a result of five years of research, this tapestry project could allow her to “merges the tracing papers”, by setting the image into a unique gesture, the one of the weavers.

The weaving was realized by the Atelier Patrick Guillot in 2018.