Ida Ekblad is a Norwegian artist known primarily for her colourful abstract paintings and inventive freestanding sculpture made with unexpected pieces of found detritus. She is also admired for her videos, films, improvisational music, and exuberant performances of poetry.
Read MoreEkblad first studied art in London at Central Saint Martins, graduating at 2001. She then attained a BA and an MA at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo, and travelled to Los Angeles for further study at the Mountain School of Arts (2008).
Ida Ekblad's paintings often have a lightness of touch, love of saturated colour and rhythm, and a celebratory mood involving rapid improvisation, layering, and pattern. She is influenced by many artists, particularly Henri Matisse and the CoBrA group, but she has her own distinctive, exuberant style.
In her works, abstraction boldly rubs shoulders with figuration with a flat picture-plane dominating, so that the four edges of the stretched canvas are emphasised, like the canvas surface. Often different types of unusual paint, like puff paint or plastisol, are incorporated. Sometimes she also incorporates written language.
Related Ekblad paintings include Platoon (2019), Her Motor Centre (2020), The Moon Still Hangs Pale Over the Water (2019), A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (2019), and The Girls Will Bring You Nightmares (2020).
Sometimes her paintings have long meandering bits of fragmented poetic sentences for titles, like: Hitherto unexposed in the darkest part of some old ossuary, jardiniere, urn, krater, vessel, jar or pot, mouth blown in the fragile metropolis of Venice, in the 80's (2017); or Let me not forget to record, do not to disturb if death should happen in the night. Not to let me know it until I arise at my usual time (2017).
Her freestanding sculptures include Sportswear (2019), Tortoise with a Sail (2019), Bent on Consuming Mankind (2019), Step Motherfucker (2017), and Vampire Squid (2015).
Ekblad's performances are highly energetic as seen in her videos, In Exile From the Mineral Kingdom (2009), where she is raiding a scrap-metal yard for sculpture materials, or Digging Treasure (2010) with Nils Bech, where they make music using voice and improvisational percussion.
Ida Ekblad has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include We Were Patient, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2022); Girl Fires Up Stove, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2021); A deadly summer of all forces, Kistefos Museum, Norway (2021); A Deep Medicine, Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris (2020); Slice of the Inaccessible, Peder Lund, Oslo (2020); Fra Åre Til Ovn, Kunsthalle Zurich (2019); Blood Optics, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2019); I'm four years old, XYZ Collective, Tokyo (2018).
Group exhibitions include Christen Sveaas Art Foundation: The Travel Bureau, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Reconstruction, Karma International, Zurich (2022); Geneva Biennale (2020); Bed and Clock, Moon and Beach: Edvard Munch, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2020); (Nothing but) Flowers, Karma, New York (2020); Concoction of Confusion, Golsa, Oslo (2019).
Ekblad's work in held in the collections of Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Rubell Museum, Miami; Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Park, Oslo; and National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.
The artist's Instagram can be found here.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
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