LONDON.- Thaddaeus Ropac welcomes Danish-born Paris-based Eva Helene Pade to the gallery and will co-represent her with Galleri Nicolai Wallner. Pade's work recently featured in our London gallery as part of the group show Embodied Forms: Painting Now. Her first solo exhibition with us will be in London in October 2025. Before this, Pade's first institutional solo show will open at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark in April 2025, curated by Rasmus Stenbakken.

Eva presents a strikingly new approach with her painterly interrogation of the human subject. Her work is distinctly reflective of the era in which we live, whilst drawing upon a lineage of Northern European figurative artists. Her paintings are both transportative and provocative, continually pushing forward the possibilities for depicting empowered female embodiment. — Thaddaeus Ropac

Art history stands as a point of departure for Eva Helene Pade, notably the work of Edvard Munch, James Ensor and Otto Dix. Her compositions present dreamlike, open-ended narratives fused with a sense of the mythological. Described by Pade as a ‘surrender to the more metaphysical parts of the paintings,’ her work pushes beyond the figurative towards the transcendental. The female body is central to her practice, represented as a site of empowered agency.

Starting as ‘coordinates’ on the canvas, her figures emerge from layer upon layer of paint in clusters, crowds or singled out from these configurations in meditative depictions of individuals. Their faces stare out defiantly from the canvases, emerging from fluid compositions or dissolving into rich, jewel-toned strokes of paint. Full-length interlocking figures dominate indeterminate sites, often appearing not only expressionless but featureless or entirely covered, emotion conveyed through their stance or contortion. Limbs connect or multiply with resonating blurred edges and areas of the cotton canvas are left exposed, inviting myriad readings. These forms extend a sense of the self beyond the body and open up spaces with which she ‘allows for the connections we all have. Where you have the sacrifice, dreams and hopes.’

With my figurative painting, I create blurred lines or gaps that become the language for the things we can't put into words. That's what I envy so much about abstraction, it's already working in a realm for which language does not exist. — Eva Helene Pade