Eva Helene Pade Søgelys

Søgelys marks Eva Helene Pade’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark (2025), the exhibition brings together a significant new group of paintings in which Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space. Her monumental and small-scale canvases are suspended on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, set away from the walls to create dynamic spatial configurations. Much like choreography, ‘it forces people to move within them,’ she says, ‘but also to connect the paintings together. I create them together, like an ensemble; they talk together.’ The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, including an essay by Hendrik Folkerts, Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 

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Pade is drawn to the commotion of the ensemble – how, within a crowd, a single figure might begin to lose distinction, morph into another, or distort as it surges and contracts. In her paintings, casts of jewel-toned bodies gather in thrumming, indeterminate spaces that recall nightclubs or theatres.

The female body is central to Pade’s practice, making up the majority of the figures in her crowd scenes. Departing from art-historical traditions, it is depicted not as an object of gaze or individual identity, but as a vehicle of collective expression and embodiment. ‘I approach figures more like a colour palette, vessels for emotions,’ she says. For Pade, the body forms part of a primal, instinctive language, like a brushstroke, a gesture or a dance. In her works, it becomes a volatile thing, as though oil paint is not only a medium with which to render flesh physically – a face, smudged lips, breasts and thighs – but the substance by which it might ultimately be dissolved.

Den fundne (The found one), 2025
Oil on canvas
300 x 300 cm (118.11 x 118.11 in)

In Skygge over mængden (Shadow above the crowd), the largest painting on view and the anchor of the exhibition’s main themes, figures smoulder in the aftermath of chaos. As the eye drifts upward from scorched feet and trampled embers, a winged silhouette takes shape in the smoke, backlit against a blazing yellow sky. Meanwhile, faint beams of searchlights roam like watchful eyes. These searchlights, which lend the exhibition its title, amplify drama in Pade’s paintings. At times, they become fluorescent shafts that perforate the crowd, repelling figures like magnetic poles, and in others they refract off bodies and scatter into shards, clashing like lances in a medieval charge and recalling the battle scenes of Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello.

Skygge over mængden (Shadow above the crowd), 2025
Oil on canvas
300.4 x 390 cm (118.26 x 153.54 in)

Opløst (Dissolved), 2025
Oil on canvas
40.2 x 30.1 cm (15.83 x 11.85 in)

Increasingly, smoke weaves through Pade’s compositions, threatening to obfuscate narratives into hazy recollections and bringing with it a sense of lingering danger. ‘I’ve become fascinated by smoke and shadows as poetic objects which aren’t objects,’ she says, ‘they aren’t tangible and they became a vessel to abstract the characters in these paintings’.

I røg (In smoke), 2025
Oil on canvas
48.2 x 35.3 cm (18.98 x 13.89 in) 

Over (Above), 2025
Oil on canvas
40.2 x 30.1 cm (15.83 x 11.85 in)

Pade’s work draws on a tradition of history painting – with its sweeping war scenes and portrayals of religious and mythological events – as well as the murals of Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Collapsed dancers become modern-day Pietàs, and elsewhere, Pade conjures ancient tales of metamorphosis – of Persephone, dragged into the depths of the underworld, Jupiter and Io, or Daphne as she flees Apollo, limbs contorting into the branches of a laurel tree. Intimating cycles of temptation and redemption, expulsion and resurrection, Pade casts her figures in states of suspension, where beginnings and ends become brinks and edges. She explains, ‘I want it to stay in the collapsing part all the time. I wanted to keep the tension.’ 

Vågen (Awake), 2025
Oil on canvas
40.2 x 30.1 cm (15.83 x 11.85 in)

The smaller paintings in the exhibition become apertures in Pade’s storytelling, capturing glances, touches and other fleeting exchanges. Like the history painters who enlivened their scenes through complex configurations of poses, Pade, too, twists narratives into dance. And yet, her stories exist beyond place, time or subjectivity. ‘I became increasingly interested in the aesthetic of violence, not only in the act itself but in how it’s remembered, retold and interpreted,’ she says. 

Knækkede stråler (Broken rays), 2025
Oil on canvas
300.2 x 200.2 cm (118.18 x 78.82 in)

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.
— Hettie Judah

Neon, 2025
Oil on canvas
80 x 75 cm (31.49 x 29.52 in)

Rød nat (Red night), 2025
Oil on canvas
240 x 209.7 cm (94.48 x 82.56 in)

Pade is as interested in rendering anatomical form as she is in exploring the spaces between bodies. ‘You could say that these are sort of gaps in life,’ she explains, ‘or spaces where little abstractions and poetry can sneak in.’ Light filters through the canvases, revealing shadows of underpainting on the reverse like charred brushstrokes, while exposed frames and stretcher bars further reveal each painting’s construction. As Folkerts writes: ‘In staging painting as both a citation of art-historical antecedent and a performative encounter, she transforms style itself into a dynamic, networked force – an expanded field in which certain art-historical precedents become newly animated in the present.’

 

Midt fald (Mid fall), 2025
Oil on canvas
240 x 210 cm (94.48 x 82.67 in)

På række (In line), 2025
Oil on canvas
215.2 x 400.5 cm (84.72 x 157.67 in)

Installed in the round, Pade allows fragments of her images to overlap so that throngs of characters appear to flit from one scene to another, vanishing and then recurring as they do in dreams. Her crowds begin with a series of rough circles and dashes, what she refers to as ‘coordinates’ that plot faces and movement. These marks are deliberately minimal so that she can approach each canvas freely and, without overplanning, allow herself to become lost as she paints. 

Bid (Bite), 2025
Oil on canvas
80 x 67.1 cm (31.49 x 26.42 in)

Greb (Grip), 2025
Oil on canvas
55.2 x 50.2 cm (21.73 x 19.76 in)

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.

— Eva Helene Pade

Overgivet (Surrendered), 2025
Oil on canvas
40.2 x 30.1 cm (15.83 x 11.85 in)

In the press

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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, staged the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, curated by Rasmus Stenbakken.