Phoebe Evans in her London studio by Blue Shop Gallery, 2024
Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Portals'
Phoebe Evans
6th - 23rd March 2025
PV Wednesday 5th March 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm
Phoebe Evans (b.2000) is a painter living and working in London. Her practice utilises magic realism to draw on the process of the sublime and the liminal. Harmonising colour and exploring perspective, the environments become a fantasy of reality. The attention to atmosphere and tonality, however, is what pushes these paintings away from the known and into an abstract space. The beguiling hues and soft brushwork shifts the work to the concept of limitlessness and the endless possibility of dreaming minds.
Phoebe Evans studied MA painting at The Royal College of Art after achieving a First Class BA Hons in Fine Art Painting at Camberwell College of Arts. Phoebe Evans has shown with Blue Shop Gallery in our group show IN ABSENTIA (2024) and London Art Fair (2025). Past group shows include Shipton Gallery (2024) ‘Buffer 2’ Guts Gallery (2023), Liliya Art Gallery (2023), Gillian Jason Gallery (2023).
COLLECTOR’S BRUNCH
Saturday Brunch with Phoebe Evans at Blue Shop Gallery | Collectors, artists and everyone is welcome
Saturday 22nd March | 11.30am-12.30pm
RSVP hello@blueshopcottage.com
‘Portals’
How does it feel to enter a space that is both uncannily familiar and yet distant from reality? In ‘Portals’, Phoebe Evans explores the endless possibilities of our own imagination, blurring the line between the physical world and the elusive interior of the mind. Referring to her universe as a Dreamscape, the painter dissolves the boundaries between the physical and the metaphorical, deconstructing two key visual elements: colour and tonality.
By drawing the eye into a space devoid of objects, Evans reduces the room to a pure atmosphere. Her paintings engage with the body’s stillness and a lingering sense of anticipation. Exploring the idea of doors opening into nothingness, they suggest that stepping through may lead somewhere unknown. In these empty homes, an eerie quality emerges as our senses are no longer distracted by the intimate presence of objects. This absence compels the viewer to focus solely on the space itself, heightening awareness of our own presence within these imagined rooms, filling them with only what exists in our minds. Without anything inside, a house is not a home. Instead, these impossible spaces become facilitators of imagination, nostalgia and unease. 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.
Drawing from many cultural references, Evans alludes to painting, literature and cinema in this phenomenal body of work. One might recognise Surrealism and Post-Impressionism as the guiding forces in the painter’s exploration of interiority. Evans also references Henry James’ 1908 short story The Jolly Corner; Like Spencer Brydon, who returns to a childhood home vacant and unfurnished, the viewer is invited into spaces defined by nostalgia and absence. Lastly, Henry Selik’s animated treasure Coraline deeply resonates with Evans, particularly its idea of the ‘Other World’ and the protagonist’s journey into finding resilience within oneself rather than in an alluring but fabricated fantasy.
Exhibition text by Salome Jacques
Hello@blueshopcottage.com to register for the catalogue.