Overview
‘With my figurative painting, I create blurred lines or gaps that become the language for the things we can't put into words. That's what I envy so much about abstraction, it's already working in a realm for which language does not exist.’
Art history stands as a point of departure for Danish-born, Paris-based artist Eva Helene Pade. Her paintings draw upon a lineage of Northern European figurative artists, including Edvard Munch, James Ensor and Otto Dix in her investigation of the complexities of human relationships.
In her compositions, dreamlike, open-ended narratives are fused with a sense of the mythological. Described by Pade as a ‘surrender to the more metaphysical parts of the paintings,’ her work pushes beyond the figurative towards the transcendental as she proposes a new painterly approach to depicting female embodiment today.
Represented as a site of empowered agency, the female body is central to her practice. Starting as ‘coordinates’ on the canvas, her figures emerge from layer upon layer of paint into clusters and crowds, or are singled out from these configurations in meditative depictions of individuals. Their faces stare out defiantly from the canvases, materialising from fluid compositions or dissolving into rich, jewel-toned strokes of paint. Full-length, interlocking figures dominate indeterminate sites, often appearing not only expressionless but featureless or entirely covered – emotion conveyed through their stance or contortion. Limbs connect or multiply with resonating blurred edges and areas of the cotton canvas are left exposed, inviting myriad readings. These forms extend a sense of the self beyond the body and open up spaces with which she ‘allows for the connections we all have. Where you have the sacrifice, dreams and hopes.’
Art history stands as a point of departure for Danish-born, Paris-based artist Eva Helene Pade. Her paintings draw upon a lineage of Northern European figurative artists, including Edvard Munch, James Ensor and Otto Dix in her investigation of the complexities of human relationships.
In her compositions, dreamlike, open-ended narratives are fused with a sense of the mythological. Described by Pade as a ‘surrender to the more metaphysical parts of the paintings,’ her work pushes beyond the figurative towards the transcendental as she proposes a new painterly approach to depicting female embodiment today.
Represented as a site of empowered agency, the female body is central to her practice. Starting as ‘coordinates’ on the canvas, her figures emerge from layer upon layer of paint into clusters and crowds, or are singled out from these configurations in meditative depictions of individuals. Their faces stare out defiantly from the canvases, materialising from fluid compositions or dissolving into rich, jewel-toned strokes of paint. Full-length, interlocking figures dominate indeterminate sites, often appearing not only expressionless but featureless or entirely covered – emotion conveyed through their stance or contortion. Limbs connect or multiply with resonating blurred edges and areas of the cotton canvas are left exposed, inviting myriad readings. These forms extend a sense of the self beyond the body and open up spaces with which she ‘allows for the connections we all have. Where you have the sacrifice, dreams and hopes.’
Eva Helene Pade received her BFA and MFA from The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2024. Early recognition for her work includes the prestigious Young Talent Prize from the Carlsberg Foundation in 2017. Since then, she has exhibited her work both in solo and group shows across Europe and the United States, and has participated in significant curatorial projects including Uno, Nessuno, Centomila at Palazzo Capris, Turin (2021) and Forårsudstillingen at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2021). In April 2025 ARKEN Museum [of Contemporary Art], Ishøj, Denmark, will stage the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, curated by Rasmus Stenbakken.
Watch an introduction to the artist
Artworks
Eva Helene Pade
Morgen (Morning), 2024
Oil on canvas
300 x 360 cm (118.11 x 141.73 in)
A reflection on the artist's work by Hettie Judah, writer and curator
Floating free of the specifics of time or place, the figures in Eva Helene Pade's paintings are united in mysterious common enterprise. It might be ecstatic dance, orgiastic rites, occult practices, or perhaps the enforced companionship of paradise or damnation. Licked with crepuscular shades of indigo and rose madder, they pullulate as though one flesh, moved by a beat, a cause, an emotion. Faces and bodies merge and blend: slim, smooth, soft-chested and ambiguous. Occasional phallic forms peep out - hot pink - from between clustered forests of feminine thighs. Bodies press against one another, mustering and embracing, framed by great loose sweeps of intense colour.
We use the word ‘medium’ to describe an artist’s materials, but for some artists it feels apposite to think of this ‘medium’ in a more spiritual sense – paint as a conduit for communication beyond the conscious realm. Some have felt their hands directed by spirit guides – among them Georgina Houghton, Madge Gill and Hilma af Klint. There are others (including, recently, Marlene Dumas) who court hazard and indulge in pareidolia, pouring, soaking, dripping paint and teasing faces and other images out of the forms that emerge. To work in this way acknowledges the limitations of gestural abstraction – that the viewer who ‘completes’ the work must fight a predisposition to detect an image where none was intended.
Eva Helene Pade
Birkeskov, 2023
Oil on cotton
240 x 360 cm (94.48 x 141.73 in)
Eva Helene Pade
Efter faldet (After the fall), 2024
Oil on canvas
213 x 182 cm (83.85 x 71.65 in)
Eva Helene Pade
Untitled, 2023
Oil on cotton
90 x 90 cm (35.43 x 35.43 in)
