With a confident sincerity Thorhauge ventures into the alphabet of clichés: naked people in nature, strong horses, and skulls, but behind the symbol-heavy pictorial language, fundamental re-thinkings can unveil themselves. Gazes directed at these androgynous bodies seemingly belong to the bodies themselves. The horses are peculiar beings rather than war animals.

In line with feminist thinker Donna Haraway’s theories about speculative fabulation – a notion of history writing imagining alternative worlds where patriarchy, violence, and demarcations of species are eliminated – Ida Sønder Thorhauge uses her open, curious figuration as a tool for analysis. She creates a form of speculative fabulation in the shape of images. Characteristic of fabulation is exactly how it produces a surplus of meaning enabling new interpretations of well-known objects, structures, truths.

Formal mythologies of figurative painting are punctuated in Ida Sønder Thorhauge’s work because she applies them with her eyes wide open. To be a female painter is to battle an art history that is always already dominated by men, but Thorhauge perseveres into this history, paints herself up against it, and makes it her own. She creates large-scale oil paintings with archaic motifs and so reclaims a representation that rarely sprouts from feminist thinking. When clichés are worn as jewelry they can be revived.