Ida Ekblad: WE WERE PATIENT

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 The forms and gestures found in her work derive from a wide variety of inspirations and art historical references, such as CoBrA, Situationism and Abstract Expressionism but also pop cultural aesthetics like graffiti or cartoon that indicate Ekblad’s genre-crossing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.

‘At the heart of this work is an energy, one that is palpably manifest in her finished images and objects. It is explicit in the manual strength required to construct one of her sculptures or to scramble up a scrapheap, yet also implicit in the movement, form and scale of her painting. Ekblad’s work is formed of contradiction; that of the social and the solitary, the physical and the contemplative. In Ekblad’s work, these similarities and differences are held in a delicate balance.’

S. McCrory, ‘Ida Ekblad’, in Ida Ekblad: Poem Percussion, exh. cat., Bergen: Bergen Kunsthalle, 2010, p. 27