Eva Helene Pade Reframes Sacrifice as Resistance The artist’s visceral canvases recast the relationship between femininity and violence
By Sofia Hallström
Aged just 27, Danish-born artist Eva Helene Pade has already developed an assured painterly language that feels distinctly her own. Her debut institutional solo show, ‘Forårsofret’ (The Rite of Spring) at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, does not arrive quietly. With natural light entirely blocked from the gallery, the room is saturated with the colour and visceral energy of Pade’s latest paintings: ten large-scale, freestanding canvases staged diagonally across the room and tiered like theatrical vignettes, guiding viewers along a narrative path. Despite taking its title from Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet, Pade’s exhibition is far from a literal homage. Instead, she composes something more urgent: a painterly reckoning with sacrifice and femininity, challenging traditional portrayals of women as passive victims.
When Stravinsky’s ballet premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, audience members were incited almost to riot, shocked by the composer’s raw and propulsive musical score accompanied by Vaslav Nijinsky’s angular and grounded choreography. More than a century later, Pade revisits the ballet’s narrative, in which a sacrificial virgin must dance herself to death to ensure the return of spring. By interrogating this plotline, the artist asks us to consider why such a sacrifice is necessary and who should decide the protagonist’s fate.
‘Forårsofret’ opens with Adoration of the Earth (2025), a diptych of two nude figures reclining in beds of sunflowers. At first glance, these scenes appear serene: the women’s faces are calm, almost indifferent. A closer look, however, reveals petals with razor-sharp edges, tense torsos and a storm brewing in the background. Pade’s palette is a bruised blend of acid greens, dark cobalt and rusty yellows: here and throughout her work, beauty is entangled with violence. In The Game of Abduction (2024), female figures stand fully nude and streaked with crimson, their features blurred with movement. Whilst the violence of sacrifice is still present, the women are far from submissive. Striking confident poses with hands raised above their heads, they exude agency. Their interactions carry a sapphic undertone, in a subtle subversion of the heteronormative themes typically found in the ballet’s narrative.
