Daydream – Artwork
Oil paint on canvas. 124 × 99 cm, 2024.
A new narrative in the old tongue.
Daydream is an oil painting that deliberately borrows the visual grammar of Old Master hero and battle imagery—those historic stages where power is rehearsed, mythologised, and usually gendered male by default. Art history has not been neutral in who it frames as the subject of agency: “greatness” was structurally produced through access, training, and institutions that systematically excluded women. Even when women dominate the image-field as bodies—especially as nudes—institutions have historically shown far fewer works by women.
“Female rage deserves a canon.”
Lotte Hauss answers this imbalance not with illustration, but with a re-authoring of the archetype. In Daydream, the central figure is not muse, bride, ornament, or casualty; she is momentum. A warrior woman—wind-lashed, upright, unsentimental—rides into the frame as a force of nature rather than a character in someone else’s story. The beasts around her, with their unruly, mythic presence, nudge the viewer to recognise the work as a contemporary intervention: a staged impossibility that exposes the old staging as equally constructed.
This is where the “daydream” turns feral. The picture behaves like a remembered legend and a critique at the same time: it keeps the solemn lighting and epic compositional drama of the canon, then breaks the canon’s casting. The result is a new narrative in the old tongue—one that refuses the inherited roles and installs another kind of heroine: not exceptional because she is “like a man,” but sovereign because she is written as power without apology.
