Digging. Treasure
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. During the summer Ida Ekblad has collected material for her sculptures from Stockholm's containers and scrapyards.
Ida Ekblad relates, in a natural way, to a tradition of painting and sculpture. Combining free and spontaneous painterly gestures 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 deformed 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. 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.
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.
The exhibition is supported by Royal Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm and OCA (Office for Contemporary Art Norway).
Opening 27 August 2010
Bonniers Konsthall
Torsgatan 19, SE-113 90 Stockholm
Hours: Wed-Fri 12-19 Sat-Sun 11-17