Ida Ekblad: Melted Snow

Ida Ekblad’s (b. 1980) artistic practice incorporates painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking as well as poetry. Her works transmit a distinct vibrancy and spontaneity, created through the energetic movement of her compositions, the bold application of colour and the attentive use of found materials. Ekblad's expressive paintings often depict winding and twisted lines, some indicate human-like figures, others resemble landscapes. The forms and gestures found in her work derive from a wide variety of inspirations and art historical references, such as CoBrA, Situationism and Abstract Expressionism but also pop cultural aesthetics like graffiti or cartoon that indicate Ekblad’s genre-crossing approach.

‘Ekblad's practice is guided by drift, mobilized by ample curiosity, and pushed by the relentless activity of making. And it is precisely these centrifugal forces that stand in such fertile conflict with the artist's strong sense of form and style, which is why the usual story of artistic progress – where concept is translated into form, where an idea assumes a shape – does not apply here. It sometimes seems in Ekblad's practice as if form, idea, and production operate independently of each other, sometimes synchronously, sometimes in contradiction, sometimes equanimously.’

D. Baumann, ‘How to Escape it’ in Ida Ekblad: Melted Snow, exh. cat., Milan: Lenz, 2022, p. 466–467