Ida Ekblad

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.” (Ida Ekblad, Artist Statement, “A mansion for all lovely forms,” 2018)

Ida Ekblad studied at Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts and Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Places of work recorded in the authority are Berlin and Oslo. Work by Ida Ekblad is recorded in the collections of Hessel Museum of Art.

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.

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.

• 2010: Digging. Treasure. Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden • 2010: Poem Percussion, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway • 2013: The Root cellar, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands • 2013: Ida Ekblad, National Museum of Norway - Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway • 2015: Ida Ekblad, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom • 2017: Ida Ekblad – Diary of a Madam, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany • 2018: Leda Bourgogne | Ida Ekblad, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany • 2019: BLOOD OPTICS, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico • 2019: FRA ÅRE TIL OVN, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

• 2011: ILLUMInazioni, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy • 2013: Revolution, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, Switzerland • 2015: Raw and Delirious, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland • 2015: The World is Made of Stories, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway • 2017: University of Disaster, Venice Biennale, National Pavilion Bosnia & Herzegovina, Palazzo Malipiero, Venice, Italy • 2018: Faithless Pictures, National Museum, Oslo, Norway