Ida Ekblad has very quickly become one of our most talked-about young Norwegian artists, and has succeeded in both convincing and surprising an ever-wider public. Among other things she was the only Norwegian representative at the main exhibition in the Venice Biennale in 2011. Ekblad’s solo exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall in the autumn of 2010 was the artist’s largest solo presentation so far, and consisted primarily of new sculptures and recently produced paintings, and to mark the occasion her first catalogue was produced.
After scavenging through local scrap dealers’ yards and garbage dumps for material, or quite simply incorporating things more or less from the street, Ekblad often creates her sculptures at the exhibition site. The sculptures stand as poetic testimony to the performative actions behind them. The stray finds are reworked sculpturally, bent and twisted, or they are used untreated, almost as they are. In the concrete-based sculptures the objects are sunk in a base of cement. The process recalls the way improvising musicians create in the heat of the moment.
Ekblad’s poetry is also partly based on found material. In combination with her own poetry, she likes to draw text fragments from various sources, from a cigarette packet to classic literature or song titles that come together in Beat-based, cut-up poetry. In some cases the poems are created with a direct background in ‘sculpture walks’ where the text is worked up on the basis of the specific material she has found among garbage and things from the street.
This catalogue features several of Ekblad’s poems and illustrations of a large number of sculptures and paintings, all produced in the course of a two-year period before the exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall. In the book Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Sarah McCrory contribute new texts about Ida Ekblad.
Published by: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010
Editors: Ida Ekblad, Steinar Sekkingstad, Solveig Øvstebø
Artist: Ida Ekblad
Texts: Sarah McCrory, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Ida Ekblad
Design: Anders Nordby
Pages: 86
Illustrations:
ISBN: 978-82-997326-9-7
Soft-cover: 14,5 × 20 cm
Language: English / Norwegian
Price: EUR 19 / NOK 150