Smoke, Rhythm, Revelation: Eva Helene Pade at Thaddaeus Ropac London An interview with the artist
By Ana Novi
On a luminous December afternoon in London, the grand rooms of Thaddaeus Ropac’s Ely House seem to inhale and exhale light. Against marble floors and baroque arches, Eva Helene Pade’s paintings hover on slender metal posts—not so much installed as poised, like performers awaiting their next cue. Their jewel-toned bodies flicker between presence and disappearance as viewers drift among them, stepping into scenes charged with both ecstasy and foreboding.
This is “Søgelys,” the 28-year-old Danish painter’s first solo exhibition in the U.K., following her acclaimed institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year. Pade’s work draws from a distinctly Northern lineage—the psychological unease of Edvard Munch, the carnivalesque delirium of James Ensor, the moral and anatomical tension of Otto Dix—yet she absorbs these echoes into a wholly unique contemporary vocabulary of smoke, velocity, and collective emotion. There are glimmers, too, of Gustav Klimt’s symbolic shimmer, Édouard Manet’s fractured theatre of history, and Diego Rivera’s mural-like sense of scale.
Equally present is the influence of performance: the ritual charge of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the physical intelligence of ballet, the emotional extremity of Pina Bausch’s choreography, and the heightened dramaturgy of Paris’s opera and dance culture, which Pade immersed herself in after relocating. In her hands, these influences do not appear as citations but as atmospheres—impulses that shape rhythm, tension, and the breathing architecture of her compositions.
Suspended in air, her canvases become stages. Bodies surge and collapse, glances ricochet, smoke thickens into memory, and light cuts through like a search beam. The result is a theatre of painting that feels at once mythic and unnervingly current, poised in a liminal space where figuration loosens into something metaphysical and emotionally exacting. It was within this charged terrain—and amid the winter stillness of Mayfair— that Whitewall spoke with Pade for an in-depth conversation about intuition, crowds, archetypes, and the delicate choreography between control and surrender that defines her work.
