EVA HELENE PADE: SØGELYS
THADDAEUS ROPAC presents Søgelys, work that marks Eva Helene Pade’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark (2025), the exhibition brings together a significant new group of paintings in which Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space.
October 14—December 23, 2025
Her monumental and small-scale canvases are suspended on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, set away from the walls to create dynamic spatial configurations. Much like choreography, ‘it forces people to move within them,’ she says, ‘but also to connect the paintings together. I create them together, like an ensemble; they talk together.’ The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, including an essay by Hendrik Folkerts, Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
The female body is central to Pade’s practice, making up the majority of the figures in her crowd scenes. Departing from art-historical traditions, it is depicted not as an object of gaze or individual identity, but as a vehicle of collective expression and embodiment. ‘I approach figures more like a colour palette, vessels for emotions,’ she says. For Pade, the body forms part of a primal, instinctive language, like a brushstroke, a gesture or a dance. In her works, it becomes a volatile thing, as though oil paint is not only a medium with which to render flesh physically – a face, smudged lips, breasts and thighs – but the substance by which it might ultimately be dissolved.
In Skygge over mængden (Shadow above the crowd), the largest painting on view and the anchor of the exhibition’s main themes, figures smoulder in the aftermath of chaos. As the eye drifts upward from scorched feet and trampled embers, a winged silhouette takes shape in the smoke, backlit against a blazing yellow sky. Meanwhile, faint beams of searchlights roam like watchful eyes. These searchlights, which lend the exhibition its title, amplify drama in Pade’s paintings. At times, they become fluorescent shafts that perforate the crowd, repelling figures like magnetic poles, and in others they refract off bodies and scatter into shards, clashing like lances in a medieval charge and recalling the battle scenes of Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello.
Floating free of the specifics of time or place, the figures in Eva Helene Pade's paintings are united in mysterious common enterprise. It might be ecstatic dance, orgiastic rites, occult practices, or perhaps the enforced companionship of paradise or damnation. Licked with crepuscular shades of indigo and rose madder, they pullulate as though one flesh, moved by a beat, a cause, an emotion.
— Hettie Judah