Bonniers Konsthall presents the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad who holds her first exhibition in Sweden. Ida Ekblad has created new works especially for the exhibition, which covers everything from expressionist painting and poems to metal sculptures and large concrete reliefs. She combines spontaneous painterly gestures with graffiti culture and street culture. During the summer Ida Ekblad has collected material for her sculptures from Stockholm’s containers and scrapyards. Look closer and our city and contemporary age appear in the form of parts of copper wire, corrugated iron and deformed cymbals.

Curatorial text

Walking across the Williamsburg Bridge from trendy Manhattan, one enters a schizophrenic world. Among Brooklyn’s old gas stations, vacant lots and abandoned factory buildings, coffee shop chains with Italian-sounding names and fashionable glass buildings have cropped up. A trend we see in many western cities today. In fact, my first encounter with Ida Ekblad’s art took place in a Brooklyn gallery. Experiencing Ida Ekblad’s work was like being faced by a direct impression of the surrounding city, which she, materially, had moved into the gallery. “Materially” as in her artistic method. She collects her working material from the city’s forgotten places.

Ida Ekblad relates, in a natural way, to a tradition of painting and sculpture. Combining free and spontaneous painterly gestures – in the spirit of the artist group Cobra – 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 deormed 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. It may sound almost quasi-religious to talk about intuitive work, but if one entertains the thought that the intellect dissects, categorises and divides the world, then intuition could dissolve these divisions and establish a direct link to life itself, its rhythm and pulse. There is a liberating quickness and playfulness in Ida Ekblad, in which her artworks could be this very synthesising connection between society and art, the street and the white gallery walls.

The manner of synthesising recurs in the way Ekblad formulates the titles of her works and writes poetry. Words and phrases collected from catchy pop songs are combined with a rather more declamatory form of romantic writing. She publishes her poems in publications that are reminiscent of simple, self-produced notebooks. There is an explicit affection for the childlike and the handmade, the result of an inherent curiosity and a disinclination for being smart and smooth.

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.

— Camilla Larsson, Curator

Thanks to the Norwegian Embassy and OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway)