Eva Helene Pade at ARKEN Women redefining art

By Emma Ness

For Danish-born, Paris-based artist Eva Helene Pade, art history serves as a springboard rather than a boundary. Her paintings trace a lineage of Northern European figurative masters—Edvard Munch, James Ensor, Otto Dix—while delving into the intricate terrain of human relationships.

Pade’s canvases unfold as dreamlike, open-ended narratives imbued with a quiet sense of the mythic. She describes her process as “a surrender to the metaphysical,” allowing her work to transcend figuration and propose a new visual language for exploring the nuances of female embodiment today.

Fresh out of the Royal Danish Academy, Eva has detonated onto the scene with Forårsofret (The Rite of Spring) — a series of large-scale oil paintings that grab your viscera and don’t ask permission. Inspired by Stravinsky’s brutal ballet and Pina Bausch’s visceral choreography, Pade reclaims the archetype of the sacrificed virgin, not with pity but with paint that bleeds agency.

Her works pay quiet homage to Manet, Klimt, and Munch, while spitting in the eye of their male gaze. Take Ritual of the Ancestors: soldiers from Manet’s Execution of Maximilian are reimagined as nude, anonymous aggressors; their target, a woman, faces them unflinching.

The Rite of Spring, her exhibition’s titular painting, is an epic maelstrom of morphing bodies: women birthing themselves, writhing, burning with purpose. A fever dream with hues of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and the dread of Dante. It feels less like a canvas and more like a séance.