Eva Helene Pade

Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts

Article

No. 38 • June 2025

For generations, the story of art has been told through a singular lens. When the first editions of canonical texts like Janson’s History of Art and Gombrich’s The Story of Art were published, they featured zero women artists. The Pretty Brilliant: Women in the Arts series aims to make whole what has long been a one-sided story. In these issues, featuring 583 artists, we celebrate women who have always been creating, innovating, and inspiring, like Eva Helene Pade.

Eva Helene Pade | Photo by Åsmund Sollihøgda

Fig 1. Eva Helene Pade | photo: Åsmund Sollihøgda

text: Giulia del Gobbo

An almost overwhelming crowd of female figures populates the large-scale canvases of Eva Helene Pade (b. 1997). The young Danish graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts inquires into how people react in crowds, explores the emotions that constitute us as humans, and examines female embodiment.

As happens in Birkeskov (2023) or Moments of transition (2022), her figures appear in transit, trying to find their way through the emotional chaos that surrounds them. Drawing inspiration from Edvard Munch and Otto Dix, Igor Stravinsky and Pina Bausch, Pade starts moving on the canvas with basic coordinates, painting dreamlike compositions quite intuitively. Indeed, indistinct lines become the language for things she cannot put into words, expressing loneliness and longing, joy and suffering.

Fig 2. Eva Helene Pade, Birkeskov, 2023, oil on cotton, 240 × 360 cm | courtesy of the artist and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, photo: Anders Sune Berg

Eva Helene Pade

‘I like the gazes within the crowds. Because even though you’re one in many, you’re also being observed.’

As she states: ‘For me it’s the same character in all of them. Even the male figures are consumed by the female figures, so they all become one thing. It becomes an abstraction, a cluster. Making them become multiple figures or blurring the outline of when the body starts, or when the hair becomes the other person’s hair or the other person’s face.’ It’s these gaps that Eva Helene Pade is interested in conveying in her paintings, allowing the viewers to join in the canvas narration.

Eva Helene Pade’s work is currently on view at a solo exhibition at ARKEN in Denmark, titled Forårsofret (The Rite of Spring) with works – inspired by Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps and choreographer Pina Bausch’s interpretation of it from 1975 – created especially for the exhibition.

Eva Helene Pade is featured in See All This #38: Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts Vol. III. Order a copy here.