Ida Ekblad
Biography
Born in 1980, Ida Ekblad is a Norwegian contemporary artist who lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. Working across painting, sculpture, collage and installation, she investigates the fleeting nature of visual culture by incorporating transient urban ephemera, such as torn posters, packaging and discarded print media, into her richly layered compositions. Ekblad explores identity by weaving together personal and communal narratives: bold calligraphic gestures reference her own graffiti practice, while motifs drawn from folk textiles and Scandinavian iconography interrogate notions of cultural heritage and gender. Her engagement with modern mythologies emerges through playful invocations of comic-book heroes, digital symbols and imagined deities, creating a pantheon of today’s visual folklore. Ekblad’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo) and MoMA PS1 (New York), and she received the SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge Art Prize in 2015. She commands strong auction results, reflecting a highly liquid presence on the international art market.