Nancy Evans | Mashups

February 28 – March 29, 2025

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Mashups, an exhibition of new experimental multimedia works by artist Nancy Evans (b. 1949, Los Angeles, CA), marking her first solo presentation with the gallery. Based in Los Angeles, Evans works across painting, drawing, sculpture and performance. 

Employing unconventional methodologies, Evans’ work draws equally from histories of abstraction in the United States and from the power of cosmic forces. Her recent practice is premised upon one body of work feeding the next, through processes of iteration and improvisation. After Evans finished a series of brightly colored abstract paintings between 2021 and 2023, instead of moving onto a completely new project, she decided to continue to build on what she had created. Using Photoshop to layer fragments of paintings together, Evans began experimenting and combining forms. The resulting compositions both echoed the paintings they drew upon and were completely new. Denser and more layered than the original paintings, the digital collages emerge as hallucinatory dreamscapes and surprising juxtapositions. 

These Mashups, as Evans calls them, take physical form as digital prints on raw linen. The layers of ink saturated the linen, giving it a dyed or stained appearance that recalls the paintings they are drawn from. For Evans, this patina is important to the works, to which she also added hand-painted details following the printing process. The finished works combine abstracted natural imagery with brilliant washes of color, blending the artist’s hand with technological intervention. Perhaps most importantly, they exist as just one step of a generative and generous artistic practice, in which each body of work becomes a source for the next.

Nancy Evans (b. 1949, Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. She has had solo exhibitions at such venues as Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (2022); Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1997); Gasworks, London (1995); and Sue Spaid Fine Art, Los Angeles (1994, 1993, 1992). Group exhibitions include those at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles (2022); ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena (2016); Torrance Art Museum, California (2015); San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, California (2013); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2008); and San José Museum of Art (2002). She is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2008); Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1988); and National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1987). Nancy Evans lives and works in Venice, CA.