Ida Ekblad

Nasjonalmuseet presents Ida Ekblad's first extensive museum exhibition. The exhibition continues the museum's series showcasing younger Norwegian contemporary artists. Since the beginning in 2009 the series has included Matias Faldbakken, Camilla Løw, Snorre Ytterstad and Marte Aas.

The works of Ida Ekblad oscillate between an unrestrained imagination and her familiarity with an art-historical tradition. Her paintings in particular are courageous demonstrations of the relevance and feasibility of an expressive artistic gesture.

Ekblad works in a variety of media—painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and poetry—simultaneously and without hierarchical distinction. Among her sources of inspiration are movements in art history such as CoBrA, Situationism and Abstract Expressionism. She also alludes to forms of expression in contemporary pop and subculture, including in the non-visual domains of literature and music.

For this exhibition, Ekblad has used the museum as her studio, producing more than 30 works in situ. These new works improvise a performative architecture out of industrial debris, found objects and shopping carts. Their rubber wheels were used for printing excerpts of poems riotously onto canvases, displayed later as a series of large scale paintings along the walls.

Process-oriented art

Ekblad works in a process-oriented manner, and her approach is often described as spontaneous and fearless. She creates installations, sculptures and collage- and assemblage-like pieces from fragments and objects that she finds along the roadside and at construction sites nearby the places she is working. Things that have apparently lost their value and been thrown away often acquire a new meaning by being re-used in a work of art imbued with other qualities and connotations.

Ida Ekblad (b. Oslo, 1980; lives and works in Oslo) is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2007) and at the Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles, USA (2008). Still an emerging artist, Ekblad has already received international recognition participating in museum exhibitions around the world.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the National Museum in Oslo, Kunstmuseum Luzern and De Vleeshal, Middelburg.

Curator: Andrea Kroksnes
Curator education: Christin Fonn / Line Engen
Project manager: Marthe Tveitan