Pam Evelyn

Dallas Contemporary is pleased to announce Pam Evelyn: Salvaged Future, opening November 7 and on view until March 15, 2026. The exhibition is the London-based painter’s first U.S. museum presentation and is curated by Executive Director Lucia Simek and Curatorial Assistant Abby Bryant.

Known for her expansive, abstract canvases that explore nature, the body, and materiality, Evelyn’s work is characterized by dense layers and rich textures, created through an intuitive process that translates her lived experiences into vibrant, dynamic compositions. Evelyn's works are deeply engaged with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism while maintaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility.

At Dallas Contemporary, Evelyn presents large-scale works created over an extended period of focused painting in various locations, including Cornwall, England, her London studio, and the Watermill Center on Long Island in New York, where she recently completed a residency. Each work reflects Evelyn’s frame of mind during her painting process. Across monumental single-and multi-panel compositions, abstract forms, varied textures, and vivid movements coalesce into something at once physical and psychological. More mindscapes than landscapes, her paintings are emotional fields shaped by memory, touch, and time, with the presence of the body sensed in gesture, traced in erasure, and recorded in residue.

“We are honored to show these remarkable paintings by Pam Evelyn at Dallas Contemporary,” says Executive Director Lucia Simek. “Presented in our largest gallery, the exhibition will afford long views of these outsized, decadently layered works, offering space for deep thinking about the art historical lineages they reference and both the fractious and effervescent contemporary energies they describe."

Evelyn’s process begins with improvisation and builds through evolving conversations with each of her canvases. Surfaces are excavated—scraped, reapplied, and buried under passages of oil. Evelyn often describes herself as a witness to her paintings, rather than their creator, allowing her works’ internal structures to emerge through conflict, resistance, failure, and unexpected resolution.

Echoing the exploratory spirit of Lee Krasner’s pioneering works, Evelyn’s bold canvases assert themselves as living, breathing, autonomous entities. Traces of Monet’s contemplative Garden at Giverny, or the visceral drama of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, emerge from the surfaces of her works upon close inspection. In Evelyn’s paintings, complex dialogues between figuration and abstraction, and across time and place, bring forth emotional and psychological resonances that defy any single reading or interpretation.

Learn more at (opens in a new window) dallascontemporary.org.