Ida Ekblad
27 Aug - 24 Oct 2010
Ida Ekblad
Digging. Treasure.
27 August – 24 October 2010
Bonniers Konsthall begins its autumn season with the young Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad, who holds her first exhibition in Sweden. Ida Ekblad creates new works especially for the exhibition, which covers everything from expressionist painting and poems to metal sculptures and large concrete reliefs. During summer, Ida Ekblad has been working on site in Stockholm and collected material for her sculptures from the city’s containers and scrapyards.
Ida Ekblad relates, in a natural way, to a tradition of painting and sculpture. Combining free and spontaneous painterly gestures with a graffiti culture, she is quite at home among popular culture and street culture’s teeming flora of expressions. At first sight, we see painting and sculpture of a neoexpressionist idiom. However, look closer and our contemporary age appears in the form of parts of copper wire, corrugated iron and deformed cymbals in what is the raw material of Ekblad’s sculptures. The materials and found objects function as reminders of our time’s mass produced and industrial abundance, which have been spared its fate to rot in a container and been merged into new entities.
Ida Ekblad (born 1980) is part of a young generation of artists who, in recent years, have contributed to the revitalisation of Oslo’s art scene. In collaboration with a couple of artist friends she has run the gallery Willy Wonka Inc in Oslo. Ida Ekblad is also part of a wider, international context and has held gallery exhibitions in, among others, Berlin and Paris, and participated in group shows such as Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York.
Digging. Treasure.
27 August – 24 October 2010
Bonniers Konsthall begins its autumn season with the young Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad, who holds her first exhibition in Sweden. Ida Ekblad creates new works especially for the exhibition, which covers everything from expressionist painting and poems to metal sculptures and large concrete reliefs. During summer, Ida Ekblad has been working on site in Stockholm and collected material for her sculptures from the city’s containers and scrapyards.
Ida Ekblad relates, in a natural way, to a tradition of painting and sculpture. Combining free and spontaneous painterly gestures with a graffiti culture, she is quite at home among popular culture and street culture’s teeming flora of expressions. At first sight, we see painting and sculpture of a neoexpressionist idiom. However, look closer and our contemporary age appears in the form of parts of copper wire, corrugated iron and deformed cymbals in what is the raw material of Ekblad’s sculptures. The materials and found objects function as reminders of our time’s mass produced and industrial abundance, which have been spared its fate to rot in a container and been merged into new entities.
Ida Ekblad (born 1980) is part of a young generation of artists who, in recent years, have contributed to the revitalisation of Oslo’s art scene. In collaboration with a couple of artist friends she has run the gallery Willy Wonka Inc in Oslo. Ida Ekblad is also part of a wider, international context and has held gallery exhibitions in, among others, Berlin and Paris, and participated in group shows such as Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York.