Artists

Ida Thorhauge

Press release

In A Storm Within, the artist’s second solo exhibition at Wilson Saplana Gallery, Ida Thorhauge presents a series of new large-scale oil paintings that explore womanhood and the presentation of women as they have been depicted through centuries in art history as well as in recent popular culture.

Eight colorful, more than human-height paintings of strong female figures surround us from the walls of the gallery. Even though the paintings unmistakably come from Thorhauge’s hand with quivering, powerful colours and clear brushstrokes, there seems to be something new at stake. Whereas collectivity and care between figures, animals and nature previously has been at the center of Thorhauge’s works, the women now stand alone and stoic in their own defined space within the picture frame. Resting in a presence that demands our attention. The figures’ bodies are wide, firmly planted on the ground, and the hands are large and expressive with distinct gestures.

Depictions of women have always interested Ida Thorhauge, and throughout her career she has explored the female figure in many different constellations. In her recent museum exhibition, Goddesses at the Museum of Religious Art in Lemvig, Thorhauge explored the mother-child motif, and the show included works which revolved around art history’s preoccupation with the complex relationship between woman and the mythical creature the unicorn. In other paintings, the community between women, across generations, or the community of fate between nature and man, has been explored.

In her new body of work, presented in A Storm Within Ida Thorhauge is not concerned with questions of identity or exploring an inner psychology. Rather, in her works, she examines personas or stereotypes that are projected and depicted in our shared cultural framework of understanding. We see representations of strong women who all stand or almost float in the pictorial space, without environment or much context. The feet are hidden, and the bodies are only  hinted at through the expressive strokes of the deep, coloured dresses. It is the gaze, the hands, the choice of colors and a few added figurative elements that tell the story of the women which we might seem to recognize from pictures of Madonnas, Ophelia stories, moods from the Brontë sisters, the Bloomsbury circle, Edvard Munch, Japanese manga tradition, and much more. Still, Ida Thorhauge’s women are unique, recognizable, and distinctive, which we can explore in their intense presence.