Women Pushing Boundaries of Art Eva Helene Pade at ARKEN Museum in Denmark

By Lee Sharrock

Eva Helen Pade is only in her third decade on the planet, yet she possesses a prodigious artistic talent that has earned her a solo museum exhibition a year after graduating from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Forårsofret (The Rite of Spring) is Pade’s first museum show and her inaugural solo exhibition. The rise of Eva Helen Pade (b.1997) has been stratospheric, and Curator Rasmus Stenbakken describes the humanity and emotional depth of her new paintings at ARKEN Museum: “The artworks featured in Forårsofret constitute a new development in Eva Helene Pade’s ongoing exploration of human emotions and human narratives through painting.”

Pade’s inspiration for Forårsofret is Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), which centres around a pagan ceremony where a young virgin is chosen from the young women of her tribe to be sacrificed to the God of spring and is forced to dance herself to death in a desperate attempt to bring about the renewal of life.

Pade saw a performance by German choreographer Pina Bausch in Paris last year, which led her to delve into Bausch’s earlier work and discover her 1975 reinterpretation of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, which was choreographed so that the dancer’s bodies appear to morph into each other, with the body is used as an instrument of expression. It is Bausch’s version that informs Pade’s reimagining of Le Sacre du Printemps.