Ida Ekblad


Ida Ekblad is a Norwegian artist who works across painting, sculpture, installation and poetry.
Her work is inspired by a multitude of sources and one can recognize sub-cultural and pop-cultural influences. Art historically, Ekblad’s oeuvre is often linked to the ideas and gestures of movements such as CoBrA, Situationism, and Abstract Expressionism and is influenced by a variety of artists such as Odilon Redon, Paula Modersohn Becker, Marie Laurencin, Paul Thek, Harriet Backer, Florine Stettheimer, and Helen Frankenthaler. Her style is signified by a genre-crossing approach and incorporates, for example, the aesthetics of graffiti, manga culture, arts and crafts, old master paintings, deviant art, and meme culture. Ekblad’s practice is focused on our hyper-retinal culture which she tries to visually record and comprehend. “Whatever sense I find,” she says, “is primarily an aesthetic sense. In painting, sculpture, and via material twists and turns, I am striving to make a personal and decent pattern of what happens to come my way.”

Background

Ekblad was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1980. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London before earning both her BA and MA in Fine Art from The National Academy of Art, Oslo, graduating in 2007. In 2016, she founded the exhibition space and record label SCHLOSS in a former Porsche car repair workshop in Oslo.

Exhibitions

Ekblad's work has been exhibited in many institutions such as the Venice Biennale, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK. In 2019, Ekblad had major museum shows at Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City and Kunsthalle Zürich.

Selected solo exhibitions

Her artwork is part of numerous public collections, among them are the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the Astrup Fearnley Museum, the Preus Museum and the Hessel Museum of Art.