Phoebe Evans

Phoebe Evans (b.2000) is a painter living and working in London. Using magic realism to reimagine vivid dreamscapes, her work draws on both the intimate and the liminal to create atmospheres between fantasy and reality. Using bright colour palettes and surrealist-like perspectives, she deconstructs the impression of atmosphere and tonality to push her paintings away from the known, and into abstract spaces. Cinematographic in essence, the rooms represented by Evans transports the viewer into the painter’s metaphorical home and intimate history. Becoming passageways into the artist’s life, the artworks are vessels leading both artist and audience in their respective subconscious. The mirage of doors and windows portrayed become portals into parallel universes which appear as complex as the reality we share. To the viewer, they might seem nostalgic yet incredibly distant, reinforcing a sense of universality shared by a feeling of familiarity. As the personal and the private are often intertwined in her body of work, Evans allows for the audience’s memories and connections to surface. The empty spaces were created to be filled with the viewer’s own memories and stories. In many ways, the paintings become collaborations between artist and viewer, as their life experiences, imagined realities and forgotten places are shared. Evans’s bright colour palette plays on the eery atmosphere that surround the rooms that she paints, highlighting their complexities and their contradictions. The lack of human presence is intentional; the viewer is invited to position themselves as they please. Furthermore, the artist wants her audience to look past what’s underneath the surface, away from what’s visible. In this manner, we are able to place and lose oneself within the work. Tone and light enrich the atmosphere, becoming a translation of static moments and fragmentations of space often inhabited within the painter’s life.