Smoke, Rhythm, Revelation: Eva Helene Pade at Thaddaeus Ropac London

On a luminous December afternoon in London, the grand rooms of Thaddaeus Ropac’s Ely House seem to inhale and exhale light. Against marble floors and baroque arches, Eva Helene Pade’s paintings hover on slender metal posts—not so much installed as poised, like performers awaiting their next cue. Their jewel-toned bodies flicker between presence and disappearance as viewers drift among them, stepping into scenes charged with both ecstasy and foreboding.

This is “Søgelys,” the 28-year-old Danish painter’s first solo exhibition in the U.K., following her acclaimed institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year. Pade’s work draws from a distinctly Northern lineage—the psychological unease of Edvard Munch, the carnivalesque delirium of James Ensor, the moral and anatomical tension of Otto Dix—yet she absorbs these echoes into a wholly unique contemporary vocabulary of smoke, velocity, and collective emotion. There are glimmers, too, of Gustav Klimt’s symbolic shimmer, Édouard Manet’s fractured theatre of history, and Diego Rivera’s mural-like sense of scale.

Equally present is the influence of performance: the ritual charge of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the physical intelligence of ballet, the emotional extremity of Pina Bausch’s choreography, and the heightened dramaturgy of Paris’s opera and dance culture, which Pade immersed herself in after relocating. In her hands, these influences do not appear as citations but as atmospheres—impulses that shape rhythm, tension, and the breathing architecture of her compositions.

Suspended in air, her canvases become stages. Bodies surge and collapse, glances ricochet, smoke thickens into memory, and light cuts through like a search beam. The result is a theatre of painting that feels at once mythic and unnervingly current, poised in a liminal space where figuration loosens into something metaphysical and emotionally exacting. It was within this charged terrain—and amid the winter stillness of Mayfair— that Whitewall spoke with Pade for an in-depth conversation about intuition, crowds, archetypes, and the delicate choreography between control and surrender that defines her work.

WHITEWALL: Your paintings often treat the body as a vessel rather than an identity—something closer to a brushstroke or a gesture. How do you find the balance between physical anatomy and the emotional or metaphysical charge it carries?

EVA HELENE PADE: It’s funny, because I don’t consciously think about anatomy when I’m working. I think about the emotion first—the atmosphere, the feeling—and the body becomes the tool that carries that emotion. Because I’m not classically trained, I’ve had to figure out how to construct bodies in my own way, and that “wonkiness” actually gives them expressiveness. If everything becomes too anatomically correct, it becomes static for me—too realistic, too literal.

The magic spot is when something is technically “wrong” but feels emotionally right. The viewer recognizes it as an eye, a face, a body—but also senses that if this figure stepped into reality, something would be uncanny or off. That slight insecurity in the figure allows the viewer to enter and interpret. It keeps things alive.

Of course, sometimes I realise a torso is twice as long as the legs and I have to adjust it. There’s a limit to how far you can go when painting figuratively. But I like that negotiation—the tension between recognizable form and expressive distortion.

When Space Begins to Move

WW: In “Søgelys,” you suspended the canvases on metal posts, allowing viewers to move among them like dancers within a set. How did you conceive of this spatial rhythm—and at what point does the choreography of the viewer become part of the work itself?

EHP: I’d experimented before with taking paintings off the wall, because the traditional presentation can strip a painting of some of its power. My canvases are only primed with glue, so parts become translucent; light passing through them activates a second image. I discovered this fully during my museum show in Copenhagen, where the backs of the paintings came to life in the afternoon light.

At Ely House, with its monumental architecture—arches, columns, marble floors—I knew a standard wall-hung show would battle with the building. Suspending the works let the space and the paintings speak together instead of competing. When you place a floating canvas in front of an arch, the arch suddenly frames the figure; the room collaborates with the work.

And then the viewer becomes part of the composition. Because the characters in the paintings are life-sized, you almost enter the crowd. You walk among them, behind them. The paintings overlap, figures drift “into” one another depending on where you stand. That dynamism—that choreography—completes the work.

Smoke, Ambiguity, and the In-Between

WW: Light and smoke seem to play double roles in “Søgelys:” they both illuminate and obscure, revealing and dissolving forms. What drew you to these elements as narrative and painterly agents—and what kinds of “truth” or illusion do they allow you to explore?

EHP: Smoke, mist, shadows—they’re wonderful because they’re real, but also intangible. They behave almost like ghosts within a scene. They occupy space without solidity.

Smoke allows for narrative ambiguity. In a painting like På Række, I didn’t want viewers to know precisely where the figures were: are they waiting for a bathroom? For something joyful? For something violent? The smoke suspends the moment in an in-between state. It could be anywhere; it could be a dream.

“Smoke allows for narrative ambiguity,”

Eva Helene Pade

Because figurative paintings rely so much on faces and how we read them, these abstract, unpredictable shapes are essential. They can heighten an emotion, muddy it, distort it, or dissolve it. Smoke introduces an element of abstraction into figuration, and that’s something I rely on.

Even in real life, when you watch smoke from a cigarette or an explosion, it forms the most incredible abstractions—appearing, vanishing. It seems to have weight and no weight at the same time. I love that contradiction.

Crowds, Archetypes, and Shared Memory

WW: Your recent works capture the strange magnetism of crowds—bodies merging, observing, and even dissolving into one another. What does painting a crowd allow you to express about human emotion or society that a single figure cannot?

EHP: A crowd contains multitudes. Every figure reflects or absorbs another. They’re hiding and exposed at the same time. So many emotions can occur simultaneously—fear, desire, boredom, joy—and none of them “wins.”

I love that you can find multiple paintings within the painting. The mood shifts depending on your own mood. Every time you return, you see something else. That feels like life—everyday emotions or grand ones—always layered, always unstable.

“Because the characters in the paintings are life-sized, you almost enter the crowd,”

Eva Helene Pade

Crowds are uncanny. You can feel incredibly alone in one, like in a club, or completely part of something larger, like in a protest. That emotional volatility is deeply human.

And practically speaking, crowds need large canvases. They must be overwhelming. They must feel like too much. Only then do they fully reveal that psychological complexity.

WW: Mythological and art-historical echoes—from the Pietà to metamorphosis— recur in your work. How do these archetypes function for you today: as symbolic structures, emotional metaphors, or intuitive fragments that emerge through painting itself?

EHP: They emerge intuitively. The Pietà-like figure in this show started with a gesture I loved—a head being held — and the rest unfolded almost without my planning it. Only later did I realize I was echoing a Pietà.

But those echoes matter. They’re part of a shared cultural memory. Even if you don’t consciously think, “Ah, the Pietà,” your body recognises something: a collapse, an exhaustion, a weight.

These archetypes are powerful tools, but they must be used carefully. They can instantly anchor a viewer emotionally, without turning the painting into an illustration of the reference. They help you translate the scene intuitively.

For me, it’s a way of staying in dialogue with art history—living or not. It’s like a toolbox I access without forcing it.

Losing Control, Finding the Pulse

WW: You’ve said that your paintings begin with “coordinates”—minimal marks that plot faces and movement—and that much of the process is about losing control. What does “getting lost” look like in your studio practice, and how do you know when a painting has found its own voice?

EHP: “Getting lost” is about getting out of your head. When you work obsessively—painters, musicians, writers all know this—there’s a point where the noise of your own thoughts drops away. It’s not logical. It’s not reasonable. You slip into something else.

Often a line I made weeks ago fits perfectly with a stroke I make now, and it feels like the painting is guiding me. It’s as if the painting knows something I don’t. And then the next day I look at it and think, “That was nonsense.” It’s humbling.

If everything is going too well, I know something is wrong. Usually the next day I end up changing half the painting. Sometimes I have to walk away, take a break, come back. Once, I even flew home from holiday to fix two works because I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

“If everything is going too well, I know something is wrong,”

Eva Helene Pade

A painting finds its voice when it breathes—when something clicks and I feel a pulse in it. It’s never an intellectual decision. It’s intuitive. You feel it in your body.

WW: You’ve described your exhibitions as almost choreographic—spaces where painting meets performance. Since moving to Paris, it feels as though music, dance, and rhythm have entered your work even more consciously. How do these influences shape the physicality of your mark-making and the emotional rhythm of your compositions?

EHP: Paris really opened that world to me. I began going to ballet and performance, and suddenly I understood how close dance is to painting—not in the brushstroke, but in composition, in the way tension moves through a body, in how movement can structure an entire scene.

I’ve been deep-diving into it: reading, watching, speaking with dancers, imagining collaborations. Dance communicates emotion without language, and that aligns completely with what I want the paintings to do. It’s become an endless source of energy—a parallel discipline that mirrors the emotional urgency I try to capture in paint.

It hasn’t changed the mark-making as much as the composition. The rhythm inside the paintings is different now. After Paris, they feel arranged by a different pulse, almost choreographed from within. There were always overlaps between dance and my work, but I wasn’t fully aware of them until I was immersed in it every day.

And of course, Paris is saturated with dance—academies, companies, studios, opera. An entire culture built around movement. It seeps in naturally. The paintings have a pulse you feel rather than hear.

“The paintings have a pulse you feel rather than hear,”

Eva Helene Pade