Artist to Watch: Eva Helene Pade Looks to Nightclubs and Ballet for Her Cinematic Paintings
Her narrative-focused paintings will next be the subject of a museum exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy
Raised in Odense, Denmark, Eva Helene Pade recently found a drawing she made at age seven that illustrates her future: By 28, she would be an artist living in Paris. Temporarily settled in a light-drenched London workspace while her Paris studio—tucked inside a former automotive plant—undergoes renovations, she is indeed living out her elementary school dreams.
Pade’s haunting, narrative-focused paintings are already in the collections of major museums such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Her solo presentation last spring with Thaddaeus Ropac at TEFAF in New York sold out immediately; next, she will be the subject of a museum exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy.
To achieve her unique style, Pade scratches alchemical oil washes into thin, rhythmic layers, or what she calls “dynamic marks.” The results are watery, fiery, smoky storms of paint that “deal with an aesthetic of violence.” Her luminous figures appear enveloped in hedonistic battle scenes, ritualistic dances, and orgiastic sexual encounters that evoke everything from the choreography of Pina Bausch and James Ensor’s crowd paintings to group behavior in nightclubs.
“It’s more about moving the painting forward rather than the individual character having its own story,” says the artist, who listens to Russian composers as she works. (Dmitri Shostakovich is her current go-to.) “I don’t think I really understood that until recently, when I started seeing more dance performances.”
Pade likes to display her works on open steel armatures, so viewers can see from one painting to the next. “It all relates to this idea of the choreography, with the audience moving between,” she says. “So much of our history is about the group and the individual at the same time, where we lose this idea of identity and the collective takes over. You sort of have to find out who you are by following the crowd.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Fall Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.