{"id":225585,"date":"2025-10-15T03:35:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T03:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/225585\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T03:35:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T03:35:10","slug":"rising-painter-eva-helene-pade-captures-the-rhythm-of-dancing-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/225585\/","title":{"rendered":"Rising Painter Eva Helene Pade Captures the Rhythm of Dancing Bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Petra Kleis. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac. <\/p>\n

Eva Helene Pade, R\u00f8d nat (Red night), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

The static medium of painting can feel a bit dissatisfying, according to Danish artist Eva Helene Pade<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s like<\/a> a disappointing animal that doesn\u2019t want to do all the tricks,\u201d she quipped, \u201cbut it does so much\u2014you could also say it doesn\u2019t need to do more.\u201d Pade\u2019s latest paintings, however, do a little bit extra. Her dramatic command of balance and light charges her sprawling scenes with electrifying tension. Though still very much paintings, they actively teeter between anguish and ecstasy. <\/p>\n

Last fall, Pade became the youngest artist<\/a> represented by the major art gallery Thaddaeus Ropac<\/a>. This week, she opens her first solo show with the gallery at its historic Ely House outpost in London, fresh on the heels of \u201cFor\u00e5rsofret\u201d (The Rite of Spring), her star-making debut institutional show at the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>. Pade\u2019s London show, titled \u201cS\u00f8gelys<\/a>\u201d (searchlight), on view through December 20th, will present a rare smattering of small works alongside her signature monumental paintings.<\/p>\n

Pade grew up in the quaint Danish city of Odense and earned her BFA from The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2021. She signed with Galleri Nicolai Wallner<\/a>, which still co-represents her, before even finishing her MFA at the same academy last year. But, around the time of her first solo show with Wallner, in 2022, Pade\u2019s work began shifting. The defined figures of earlier works (like A Story to Be Told #14<\/a>, 2021, which set her auction record last November) gave way to softer edges. By the time \u201cFor\u00e5rsofret\u201d opened at ARKEN, Pade had found her voice.<\/p>\n

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Eva Helene Pade, P\u00e5 r\u00e6kke (In line), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

Time can make all the difference, she explained: \u201cYou have less you need to prove, so everything doesn\u2019t have to be as stylized, and you become better at expressing what you want to say, faster.\u201d Moving to Paris in 2023 helped too. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel challenged,\u201d Pade recalled of Copenhagen, her previous home base. \u201cI spent time in my studio but without feeling the energy that needs to be there.\u201d Upon relocating, she painted in her flat\u2014until she found a workspace in the suburb of Pantin where she and her neighbors host rooftop barbecues. That lofty new studio also empowered Pade to work in the large scale she prefers\u2014the central paintings in \u201cS\u00f8gelys,\u201d for example, are around 8 feet tall and 9 feet wide, proportions often associated with history paintings.<\/p>\n

Paris also got Pade into dance. \u201cI\u2019d always gone to the opera or classical music, but I never really did the ballet,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s become a bigger part. Also, watching more performance art.\u201d Whereas painting is decidedly two-dimensional, dance, theater, and music occupy time and space\u2014realms Pade now aims to breach with her paintings. Rather than simply hanging on the wall, her 10 canvases in \u201cFor\u00e5rsofret\u201d stood freely throughout ARKEN\u2019s subterranean gallery on metal stands. Each one offered a narrative vignette from German choreographer Pina Bausch\u2019s take on Igor Stravinsky\u2019s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring, which infuriated viewers with its dissonant choreography and pagan subject matter. <\/p>\n

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Eva Helene Pade, Kn\u00e6kkede str\u00e5ler (Broken rays), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

Eva Helene Pade, I m\u00f8rket (In the dark), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

Spotlights trained on those 10 artworks illuminated the backs of the paintings for guests weaving through \u201cFor\u00e5rsofret\u201d who performed their own choreography. The artist found it fascinating that her initial markings shone through so decisively, displaying her works\u2019 beginning and final stages at once. \u201cThat became, now, a thing I would like to do more,\u201d she said. As such, she\u2019s presenting \u201cS\u00f8gelys\u201d in a similar fashion, perching works on ceiling-to-floor metal beams throughout Thaddaeus Ropac\u2019s 18th-century venue.<\/p>\n

Pade\u2019s ARKEN show also got her interested in the symbolic potential of smoke. Over the course of her ascendant career, she\u2019s earned a reputation for well-placed art-historic references, evoking the Expressionism<\/a> of German painter Otto Dix<\/a> and the golden haze of Vienna Secessionist Gustav Klimt<\/a> alike. \u201cSome of it is conscious, and some of it is unconscious,\u201d Pade commented. In \u201cFor\u00e5rsofret,\u201d her work Forf\u00e6drenes ritual (Ritual of the Ancestors) (2024\u201325) outright riffed off French Impressionist<\/a> \u00c9douard Manet<\/a>\u2019s rendition of the bloody conclusion to French colonialism in Mexico, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867\u201369). <\/p>\n

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Eva Helene Pade, Skygge over m\u00e6ngden (Shadow above the crowd), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

The more Pade contemplated that smoke, the more it seemed to encapsulate the murky state of current events today, where social media conspiracy theories, real corruption, and concurrent crises foster a societal state of exhausted bewilderment. \u201cEverything is confusing and ambiguous,\u201d Pade explained. By foregoing linear narrative in \u201cS\u00f8gelys,\u201d she said, \u201cYou stay in that confusion and violence a bit more.\u201d <\/p>\n

The show\u2019s first\u2014and largest\u2014work, Skygge over m\u00e6ngden (Shadow above the crowd) (2025), features a flaxen haze enveloping a cresting horde of nudes, its weightless shadows resolving into the shape of a hulking airplane as the viewer backs away. That haze settles upon the following frenzied dance floors featuring throngs of figures tangling and tangoing, challenging the boundary between the individual and the collective. <\/p>\n

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Eva Helene Pade, Den Fundne (The found one), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

Eva Helene Pade, Midt fald (Mid fall), 2025. \u00a9 Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London \u00b7 Paris \u00b7 Salzburg \u00b7 Milan \u00b7 Seoul.<\/p>\n

Archetypes reappear across canvases, transforming \u201cS\u00f8gelys\u201d into one ensemble, rather than a series of discrete works. Across its varied scales, this show presents perhaps Pade\u2019s most high-contrast work to date. Only the larger paintings, however, allow her to play with light in such a way that it deceives the viewer. In Den fundne (The found one) (2025), for instance, the viewer\u2019s gaze is initially directed towards the dancers onstage, rather than the real focal point, the comparatively drab reveler collapsed in the crowd, like a Renaissance piet\u00e0<\/a>. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s always more going on in a scene than meets the eye. Maybe painting isn\u2019t so impotent after all: For starters, it can teach us how to look, and look again.<\/p>\n

VB<\/p>\n

\"VB\"<\/p>\n

Vittoria Benzine<\/p>\n

Vittoria Benzine is a Brooklyn-based essayist, journalist, clairvoyant, and road tripper covering contemporary art with a focus on social practice, counterculture, and chaos magic. She writes a psychic column for Elephant Magazine, and contributes to a wide range of publications, including Artnet News, Maxim, Interview, and Artsy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Portrait of Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Petra Kleis. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac. Eva Helene Pade, R\u00f8d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[3861,228,226,227,229,88,126529,107325,126530],"class_list":{"0":"post-225585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-eva-helene-pade","15":"tag-thaddaeus-ropac","16":"tag-vittoria-benzine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}