Meet Eva Helene Pade, the emerging artist redefining figurative painting

‘Painting is a bit like when you try to capture your dreams,’ says Danish-born, Paris-based artist Eva Helene Pade, whose romantic figurative paintings are currently on show at Thaddaeus Ropac, London. ‘It’s like when you wake up with a very clear image of your dream, and then you realise it's not that easy and actually not that clear. Then you start sketching it and it changes completely, because then you also have the canvas itself, which makes its own dictation. So you have to change it a lot, but it has to be fun.’

Pade established a fluid, dreamy style at her institutional debut at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier in 2025, and is now presenting a new group of paintings for her first solo UK exhibition. In their celebration of the body, the works continue to consider distortion and movement. Bodies in a crowd are caught in a choreographed dance of emotion, each figure displaying their own primal language.

Pade draws on classical references for her figures in a crowd, bringing them to life with violent brushstrokes. ‘I've always been inspired by history, but in different ways,’ she says. ‘I spend a lot of time looking at the German New Objectivity painters [who established a non-sentimental reality]. Not only do they have a very interesting way of depicting the figurative, giving it a sort of ugliness and an uncanniness to them, but they also express time in an interesting way – or not necessarily time, but what is going on between moments, or between wars. It’s waiting for the next thing to happen, and how they capture it.’

It is a pause the artist reflects in her own work, paying as much attention to the spaces between bodies as she does to the bodies themselves. Pade conducts a geometrical play of shapes and overlapping forms to bring the humanity of her subjects to the fore. ‘When I start the painting, I need to capture the movements especially, and that's why, for me, it becomes more about coordinates in the beginning. When I start, it's about finding the dynamic in the painting, in a movement. Because that's in the end result. There needs to be something that's moving in the painting, if that doesn’t sound completely ridiculous, but it needs to have a pulse. I think it’s especially true when you paint figuratively, because otherwise the characters die. They become frozen.’

Eva Helene Pade, 'Søgelys' is at Thaddaeus Ropac London until 20 December 2025

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