Eva Jospin

Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts

Article

No. 38 • June 2025

For generations, the story of art has been told through a singular lens. When the first editions of canonical texts like Janson’s History of Art and Gombrich’s The Story of Art were published, they featured zero women artists. The Pretty Brilliant: Women in the Arts series aims to make whole what has long been a one-sided story. In these issues, featuring 583 artists, we celebrate women who have always been creating, innovating, and inspiring, like Eva Jospin.

Eva Jospin, Artist Portrait, 2023. 001, Photographed by Alejandro Zaras | Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim

Fig 1. Eva Jospin | photo: Alejandro Zaras, courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim

text: Catherine de Zegher

For the past decades, Eva Jospin has been composing forests, caves or nymphaea’s, architectural follies and landscapes from cardboard, textile, and various other materials. Often her installations are monumental and immersive, such as her projects at the Abbey of Montmajour (Cenotaph, 2020), Palais des Papes in Avignon (Palazzo, 2023), and most recently at the Château de Versailles (Eva Jospin – Versailles, 2024). She also signed the creation of a set of embroidered panels for the Dior Haute Couture 2021-2022 fashion show (Chambre de Soie, 2021) and created the monumental decoration for the Dior spring-summer 2023 fashion show (Nymphées, 2022).

Fig 2. Eva Jospin, Palazzo, exhibition view, Palais des Papes, Avignon, 2023 | courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim, photo: Otresson, Avignon Tourisme

Eva Jospin

‘The forest is so wide and represents so much: the brain, myth, fairy tales, psychoanalysis, among others. There’s also the fact that it exists in the air and in the ground at the same time. That is probably why it’s such an obsession.’

Jospin states that her work always develops from the forest, and sometimes she activates the illusion of depth and perspective through trompe l’oeil and metamorphosis. Among the forests are nymphaea’s with what appears to be shells and stones. But here imitation, of one material morphing into another material is in play.

There is a spatial sense of dream, specifically of a dream garden, as we walk through Jospin’s environments. The artist shifts direct perception to guide the eye to multiple dimensions within each artwork –transforming sight into a conscious, interiorized process. As she explains, ‘I try to address the landscape as one we are part of – when nature becomes not just a space we observe but one we are inside of, it transforms into an interior, imagined vision.’

Eva Jospin is featured in See All This #38: Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts Vol. III. Order a copy here.