Eva Helene Pade

Exhibited by Thaddaeus Ropac

Material Oil on canvas

Dimensions 265.8 x 310.2cm

Price $200,000

Status Vetted

About the Work

In her most recent series of paintings, Eva Helene Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces of the crowd, turning with increasing focus to night scenes that exist beyond any specific time, place or subject. Installed in the round on floor-to-ceiling metal posts, the monumental canvases position the viewer as a participant within the commotion, caught between bodies, smoke, flames and shadows – each moment suspended in lyrical, virtuosic passages of figuration. In her new works, Pade also moves toward a more restrained, near-monochromatic palette. Nude figures tangle in the darkness, cloaked only by smoke and intense, blue-green shadows that obscure narratives into hazy recollections and bring with them a lingering sense of danger.

Jagt (Hunt) (2026) draws on the choreography of the hunt. At the centre of the composition, several hounds race towards the object of their chase: a twisting, lunging figure enveloped in the smoke of firing rifles. Ambiguity lingers among these translucent clouds, which serve simultaneously to extinguish and conceal. Beneath the refuge of their abstractions, the protagonist’s body appears to sublimate, as though transformation offers a mode of protection – an escape from one form of embodiment to another.

The work reflects Pade’s engagement with historical hunting imagery, including that of Alexandre-François Desportes, official painter of animals and hunting scenes to the French kings Louis XIV and Louis XV. Pade draws on this tradition to explore the tension between violence and its depiction, considering how certain modes of representation can soften, neutralise or even erase brutality – and, in doing so, obfuscate responsibility. ‘I became increasingly interested in the aesthetic of violence, not only in the act itself but in how it’s remembered, retold and interpreted,’ Pade says.

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