Paula Evers was born in Bergen, Holland in 1942. Bergen is famous as a twentieth-century painters’ community comparable to the French Barbizon and for the Bergen School of landscape painting. Inspired by the rich culture of her surroundings Evers took classes from Peter Schenk and studied at the Van Gogh Academie in Amsterdam. Evers was a member of the painters group “ArtBent” in the early 1990’s.

Evers’ work increasingly deals with dualism in western thinking. First we meet the almost empty and typically Dutch flat landscape: metaphor for nature, balance, uncontrollable forces and passivity. In these paintings horizontal lines dominate. Single islands of form burst through fields of cobalt and orange creating distant horizons out of the void.

Secondly we are confronted with paintings defined by rationalism, culture, society and activity in which vertical figures are prominent. Abstracted human forms subtly convey emotion through gesture and color. Figures press forward, as if present when the painting was initiated, while other pairs turn away and quietly dissolve into the atmosphere.

In both subjects, landscapes and figures, we discover traces of the other including compositional elements, palettes, luminous surfaces, and a dreamlike resonance. Thus they present us with a synthesis between opposites, constituting a very complex yet visually accessible body of work, full of both cool and abstract restraint and expressive figurative emotion.

• More complete information is available in Dutch here.

Selected Exhibitions

Group

Solo