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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Petra Kleis, Eva Helene Pade, Getty Images, Everett Collection
When Eva Helene Pade gets to work on a painting, she can never really predict what will come about. Though her work is figurative, she doesn’t use models or references. “I have a blurry image in my head and I figure it out as I go along,” she tells The Cut. “I work in these color blobs and then find the characters.” It’s what she imagines sculpting is like. “You play around with it, you mold it, and you find a face in a splash of paint you made before. Or you find something from the paint underneath — I paint in many very thin layers — that you didn’t know was there.”
Pade was born in Odense, a city on an island in the middle of Denmark. She lived in Berlin before returning to Denmark to earn her B.F.A. at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2021. During the pandemic, away from the noise of what other students or her professors thought, Pade started looking at Lucian Freud’s early works, which he painted on wood. “In the beginning, I would imitate his work, just to study it,” she says. “I was interested in finding out how you could paint figuratively, but not in a Renaissance kind of way or in a photographic way.” She wanted to uncover how her favorite artists make it look effortless. Ultimately, she says, “I had to dig in and find my own way. I think it took on its own weird look.” Pade presented her first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac London in 2025 and is now debuting three new paintings at TEFAF New York. She lives and works in Paris.
Without a strong point of reference, Pade’s pieces have a dreamy, romantic quality to them. She blends figures together so that they become “one multitude of people, something abstract, rather than single portraits in a big painting.” And you never really know where her figures are situated in space. “There are hints and notions of places that feel familiar because I like to use elements of smoke and light and shade,” she says. “It doesn’t really interest me if I can tell exactly where they are because, this way, it becomes a bit uncanny and I can have more elements of abstraction in it.”
Who are the artists that, to you, make it look effortless?
For me, a big one is Edvard Munch, but there are other artists like Miriam Cahn and Marlene Dumas, painters who cut it to the bone and make it look easy. Some people might think it looks childish, but it’s an incredible skill to get that precision. They can let it look ugly at times, but it still carries a lot of depth. In the ugliness, it’s beautiful. Miriam Cahn’s paintings, for example, are very violent, but they also feel very fresh and unplanned and spontaneous. The colors are very precise, but the way she attacks it is extraordinary.
You don’t paint clothing on your figures because, as you said, it would very much place them in time. It makes you feel like a stylist and takes the focus away from the subjects. What is your own personal style? Where do you shop?
I like a uniform because I’m lazy and because now, I do so many different events. I feel like, as an artist, you can get away with it. I wear jeans, a leather jacket, and big boots. I shop mostly vintage and mostly online, because I get a bit cheap about it. If I go to a shop, I know I can get it much cheaper online because I know what to search for. There are two shops in Paris I really like. I have a friend, Didier, who has one called Plaisir Palace. It’s a really cool one, a lot of vintage Yves Saint Laurent, insane pieces. And then there’s one called Iregular. It’s close to where I live and it’s just more ’90s, cool, good leather jackets.
Who would you invite to a dinner party, dead or alive?
I’d invite Cate Blanchett because she seems cool, and I’d invite Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer — I just finished one of his books. I’d probably invite David Bowie. I feel like he would be great to talk to as a person changing between different art forms. I’d like to invite Marlene Dumas. I want to pick her brain about how she paints. I’d like to invite Virginia Woolf also. She might not be the life of the party, but she would probably be interesting.
I think it could be a bit dangerous and great at the same time. It would probably be in Paris, in some park like Buttes Chaumont. People would just join in and it would become a whole public event.
I’ll add Pina Bausch. Can I invite Bruce Springsteen as well? It would be a horrible party, actually, just me fangirling. The only thing they have in common is that I invited them.
What is your pre-painting ritual?
I turn off my phone for at least an hour and then listen to music that gets me in the mood, that puts me in a certain mind-set that fits the dynamic of the painting that I’d like to get into. For example, I started a new painting today that’s quite inspired — not the motif, but the feeling of it — by Pina Bausch’s dance called Café Müller. I listened to the music from that to hopefully get into a bit of her mind-set and how she would have tackled it.
Do you have any other rituals? Are you always in the same space when you paint?
I’ve done residencies where I paint outside or in a basement, and in the end, when you have the canvas in front of you, it’s the same mind-set and the same process. I just need to isolate everything that’s on the outside and make sure I’m not disturbed for at least an hour, which is the time I set aside to start the painting and get the colors down. It needs to dry for a couple of days, and then I can start carving out these different figures.
What’s your comfort rewatch?
I’ve watched Fleabag a lot of times. I think it is amazing. That maybe wins over Sex & the City, which is more sporadic. I like the humor. It’s so tough, but it’s also hilarious and inappropriate. This makes me want to rewatch it again.
What’s your favorite game to play?
I like Scrabble and I love chess, but no one wants to play chess with me because apparently, I’m a really bad winner — and a bad loser. With chess.com, I can play online with friends who want to play but are not there. I also used to play Scrabble online with my dad. He’s in Denmark. Now, I play a lot of Wordle and Connections. I’m kind of obsessed. I play Wordle every day. I try to use game apps to not be on socials.
What music do you listen to when you’re alone?
At the moment, I’m listening a lot to PJ Harvey. She has an album I didn’t know very well called To Bring You My Love, and it’s so good. She’s a badass. It’s a little bit punk in the attitude, but it’s also kind of soft. And I’m listening to a playlist with the soundtrack of Pina Bausch’s Sweet Mambo, because I saw it recently again here in London, and the soundtrack is amazing.
When I exercise, I listen to disc two of Scarface. You have like seven bangers in a row — Debbie Harry has a song — and it is the best stuff to work out to while I’m running, but also lifting. I feel like it’s good to be in the mind-set of an ’80s cartel drug dealer when you work out. That’s the attitude. You have those boys around you in the gym, and I can pretend that they’re my goons.
Name a book you couldn’t put down.
The most recent one I just finished reading is Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. It is just a masterpiece. It’s a memoir, written before his suicide. But it’s not just about him; it’s also about the people he meets and his friends, who were big artists and writers at the time. He lived through this strange period of the late 1800s in Vienna, which was the capital of literature and intelligence. And then, of course, the First World War comes. They sort of build themselves up again, but nothing’s the same. And then the Second World War comes, and he has to escape Austria. It says a lot about the politics at the time and the belief system of people at the time, and a whole generation that’s lost. It’s relatable to a lot of things today, in a scary way. I’ve already bought copies for four friends.
Do you collect art? And do you have a favorite piece that you own?
I collect, but it’s mostly things that I swap with my friends or younger artists that I can afford. My favorite piece is by a very good friend of mine, Igor Moritz. He painted a portrait of me playing chess. In truth — sorry, Igor — it doesn’t look like me a lot, but it captures an essence. We were at the same residency in the South of France, and it’s a lovely painting that makes me think of him and what a good time we had.
Then, I have a little etching by James Ensor because I can’t afford a James Ensor painting. It was the first thing I bought with the money I earned from a painting in my first show, and it’s signed by him. It’s a self-portrait of him painting alongside his masks, and he also made that into painting. But because I follow all these auctions, there were some etchings by him, and the signature is not at all the same. I think the guy I bought it from maybe signed it himself and scammed me.
What would your last meal be?
I would probably eat a lamb stew. Any kind of stew would be nice, but that’s only if I die in winter. If I die in summer, my last meal would be a shrimp cocktail, and then I’d have strawberries with milk and sugar for dessert. That’s my Danish heritage.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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