2025 Horsegirl solo exhibition, The Blue Verve, 23.10 – 2.11

The title Horsegirl is a term commonly used as a dismissive description of preteen girls; it is a rather awkward phase, a site of tension between the innocence of childhood, growing self awareness and social conditioning. Though the subjects in some of the paintings can be associated with girlhood, and imagery reminiscent of youth culture has been common in Paavela’s work, there is also a concentration on that in betweenness of being a “horsegirl”; a “horsegirl” is socially awkward, deeply obsessed and out of sync, but in this collection of work she is an emblem of internal division and complex embodiment.

In Horsegirl Paavela has taken inspiration from various poems that use the horse and its rider as a metaphorical imagery. Her interpretation of this imagery evokes themes of desire, described as a force both vitalistic and erosive; embodiment and the self, whether it is fragmented or whole. In Horsegirl Paavela explores what it means to be inhabited by desire, to be driven beyond the self, to surrender and to simultaneously resist it. The paintings reveal a subject who is always in motion: dreaming, desiring, becoming.