Eva Helene Pade Paints the Thin Line Between Ecstasy and Violence

Artist Eva Helene Pade is reaching her limit—literally. 

For the past few months, the young Danish painter has been working in a borrowed studio in London. Her paintings—monumental nocturnal scenes, brimming with writhing, dancing bodies—stretched to the ceiling of her temporary studio, barely able to fit into the space. 

“It’s becoming a bit cramped in here,” said Pade, with characteristic frankness, during a video call a few weeks ago, her canvases visible behind her. 

Eva Helene Pade, På række (In line) (2025). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

Pade welcomes the chance to paint on a grand scale. Over the past several years, she has become one of the art world’s buzziest young talents, known for her tempestuous scenes crowded with bodies moving through flickering, ambiguous terrains. But for close to a year now,  Pade has been living in a semi-nomadic limbo, while her Paris home is undergoing renovations. The availability of a friend’s open studio brought her to London, where she set down to work. “I’ve just been working so much, I haven’t really had a chance to see people,” she said. 

Three of these new paintings—Jagt (Hunt), Nærmere (Closer), and Opstand (Surge)—will debut with Thaddeus Ropac at TEFAF New York this week, offering a coveted first glimpse of what Pade has been developing since opening her mark-making solo exhibition, “Søgelys” at Ropac’s London outpost, Ely House, last fall.

An Art Star in the Making

Success has come quickly for Pade. Born in 1997, the artist was raised in Odense, Denmark. Enrolling in the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she earned a BFA in 2021. By 2022, she had opened a solo exhibition at Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen. In 2023, she moved to Paris, seeking a more dynamic contemporary art scene, while still completing an MFA with the Academy in 2024. 

Eva Helene Pade, Skygge over mængden (Shadow above the crowd) (2025). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

Her sinuous paintings, filled with crowds of naked female bodies, made in thin washes of color, are tied to a deep legacy of European art history, with Edvard Munch, James Ensor, and Gustav Klimt as particular influences. 

More recently, however, those influences have been metabolized into a mood rather than direct allusions. “Just two years ago or so, I would look at those painters in terms of finding inspiration or finding a solution to something,” she said, “But with my past two shows, I’ve let go of them. I no longer need them like crutches.”  

Eva Helene Pade, Knækkede stråler (Broken rays) (2025). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

In “Søgelys,” a title which translates to “search light,” Pade’s figurative paintings pushed more deeply into passages of abstraction, using beams of light to both reveal and obliterate her ecstatic crowd. The effect was part dance club, part Dante’s Inferno. 

Many of the paintings in the show were significantly scaled, measuring eight feet tall and nine feet wide. She prefers to work at this enveloping size. 

“The characters can become one-to-one, the same size as me, basically,” she said. “It has different mental energy or capacity when something is painted almost life-size, as if you could get into the painting. It’s automatically a bit more overwhelming.”

Inspired by classical music and by dance—particularly the work of choreographer Pina Bausch—Pade’s paintings at Ropac were exhibited in the round, suspended in freestanding metal posts that visitors walked around, as though navigating a crowd.  Her works at TEFAF will be presented in a similar manner. 

The past few years have sparked significant interest in her work.  She signed with Ropac in 2024, making her the gallery’s youngest represented artist. Earlier this year, Pade was featured in Artnet’s Intelligence Report “Zero to Hero” list as one of the artists with the biggest spikes in searches in the Price Database over the past year. Pade’s also work recently reached a new auction record when an untitled painting from 2022 sold at Christie’s Hong Kong in March for just under $130,000, outstripping its estimate of approximately $38,000–64,000.

While there is significant buzz around her work, Pade’s concerns remain within the boundaries of the canvas.

Dancing in the Dark

Pade’s London debut at Ropac closely followed her institutional debut in “Forårsofret” (The Rite of Spring), at the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Ishøj, Denmark, in the spring of 2025. 

“The London show was a bit of a continuation of a show I had in Copenhagen,” she said, “I worked with the theme of like sacrifice.” Pade has long been interested in classical music, but after moving to Paris, dance has emerged as a powerful metaphor.

Eva Helene Pade, Jagt (Hunt) (2026). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

“Dance is a great tool. It is figurative because you work with the body… but it’s also abstract at the same time because you’re using movements in the body or gestures,” said Pade, who has particularly been moved by the work of Pina Bausch, “Someone like Pina is an infinite source of inspiration. She has a way of translating emotions so that they don’t stand still, and she also has a lot of humor in the way she deals with serious topics.” 

In “Forårsofret,” Pade’s paintings drew from passages of Bausch’s 1975 reinterpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring. In Bausch’s revelatory piece, dancers marked the coming of spring through ritual and celebrations performed on a stage covered in dirt. Groups of male and female dancers, clad in minimalistic ensembles, engaged each other in tense vignettes, characterized by both animosity and tenderness. In the performance, one young woman is marked as a sacrifice and must dance herself to death. In Pade’s paintings, this sacrificial woman becomes a ferocious force. 

Eva Helene Pade, Rød nat (Red night) (2025). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

Painting in oil and acrylic, Pade has pushed against the static nature of the medium. “My medium is by definition static because I don’t work with film or dancers,” she said. “That’s my great envy of dance.”

Night Visions

“I wanted to try and play more with the idea of night paintings,” said Pade of her newest works, headed for TEFAF. Here, smoky hues and blue-green shadows dominate. “Not to be cliche, but there’s often the most emotion in darkness—these colors are more layered and moody, so you need to really think about how you use them.”

In place of fiery hues that punctuated the painting in “Søgelys,” these new works feel shadowed as though playing out in a dense forest or cavernous underworld. 

Pade has become increasingly interested in what people experience or see when their eyes are closed, phosphenes swirling against eyelids. Bausch’s 1978 Café Müller, in which dancers careen through a cafe set, dancing with their eyes closed, is a ready reference.  

Eva Helene Pade, Nærmere (Closer) (2026). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

“When we close our eyes or when we look at things in the night, it sort of relates to the shadow, sort of like a dream reality state that is quite interesting,” said Pade. 

Her paintings have long flirted with the threat of violence. “Crowds are interesting because there’s a fine line between, let’s say, ecstasy and violence,” she said, “With emotions, on the ultimate spectrum, there is really just a tiny gap between, before one transitions into something else, the apocalyptic inferno or ecstatic club.” 

Eva Helene Pade, Opstand (Surge) (2026). © Eva Helene Pade. Photo: Pierre Tanguy. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.

That simmering violence becomes more pronounced in Jagt (Hunt, 2026). In the compositions, hounds race toward a figure swallowed in the plumes of smoke from firing rifles. Pade has recently become interested in the works of Alexandre-François Desportes, official painter of animals and hunting scenes to the French kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, and hunting as a model of sanctioned violence as sport. 

But Pade’s paintings are not so clear cut, with despair, violence, serenity, living alongside each other in the painting Opstand (Surge). Painting crowds have become a way for Pade to express the complexity of emotion. These crowds allow viewers to jump from one emotion to the next. “Because I’m painting it, I can play with reality, right? I can show a multitude of emotions at once,” she said, “But at the same time, emotions aren’t static. These multitudes better resemble the truth.”