Pam Evelyn

Pam Evelyn was born in 1996 in Guildford, Surrey, England, and lives and works in London. She makes large-scale abstract paintings built from dense, heavily worked, gestural layers of paint, a practice that galleries and institutions consistently describe as engaging with the body, materiality, and nature.

She earned a BFA with First Class Honours from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, between 2016 and 2019, and went on to complete an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, between 2019 and 2022. While still a student she won the Cass Art Prize and the Herbert Seaborn Memorial Scholarship Prize at the Slade, both in 2019.

Her first solo exhibition, Spectacle of a Wreck, opened at Peres Projects in Berlin in 2021, the same year she showed Diaries of a Climate at Baert Gallery in Los Angeles. Her profile rose quickly through 2023, with a solo show at Pace Gallery London, a presentation with Massimo De Carlo in Paris, inclusion in the group exhibition The Reason for Painting at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, and a commission from the Whitechapel Gallery in London to produce two etchings for the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint. Pace Gallery announced her representation in July 2023, noting that she also works with Massimo De Carlo in Italy and France. In 2024 she had a solo show, Frame of Mind, at Pace Gallery in New York, and in 2025 she received a Visual Arts Fellowship at the Watermill Center in New York. Her first major US institutional exhibition, Salvaged Future, opened at Dallas Contemporary in November 2025 and runs into 2026. Her work is held in the public collections of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London.

Evelyn's critical reception to date is expressed mainly through the speed and quality of institutional and gallery validation rather than an extensive body of published criticism. Her trajectory, from a 2021 solo debut at Peres Projects in Berlin to representation by Pace Gallery within two years, a 2023 commission from the Whitechapel Gallery, and a 2025 institutional survey at Dallas Contemporary, has been treated by galleries and museums as evidence of a serious and fast-developing practice. Because she is early in her career, no verified, on-the-record critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; the record so far is built on exhibition history and institutional acquisition rather than on a settled critical consensus.

Evelyn's auction market is new and thin, dating only to 2022. Reported sales include Evening Rain at Phillips London in December 2022 for GBP 81,900, Worked on Earth at Christie's London on 13 October 2023 for GBP 113,400, described at the time as a then-record for the artist, and Assisted Step at Sotheby's New York on 16 November 2023, reported at USD 127,000, the highest price identified for her work to date. A further sale, Reclaimed Wall, made USD 120,650 at Phillips New York in February 2025. The small number of tracked sales, and the currency differences between the London and New York results, mean any single price should be read as a data point in an early, developing market rather than a stable benchmark.

Evelyn is an early-career artist without a catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through Pace Gallery and Massimo De Carlo carry unusual weight. Her auction history covers only a handful of sales since 2022, spread across London and New York and denominated in different currencies, which makes any reported "record" price provisional rather than definitive. Her market strength currently rests on gallery representation and early museum acquisitions rather than a long, tested auction record, which is the main reason to treat her prices as still forming.