Talk: Artists as Accidentologists (Stavanger Secession 2025)
Event
Saturday 14 June 2025, 16:00 – 17:00
Ida Ekblad, SMOKIES SKYLAB (2020). Puff and plastisol on cotton, in artist’s frame. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
As part of Stavanger Secession 2025, Kunsthall Stavanger presents SMOKIES SKYLAB by Ida Ekblad. The painting is a vibrant collision of background and foreground, where layers of paint behave like a palimpsest—eroded, overwritten, and unstable. Her compositions evoke the chromatic intensity of German Expressionism while embracing the formless: a collapse of order into raw affect and painterly friction. Ekblad’s palette is both exuberant and corrosive, and her marks operate like ruins of past decisions. The canvas becomes not a window but a battlefield—a site of simultaneity, tension, and continuous aesthetic undoing
Ida Ekblad
Ida Ekblad (b. 1980, Oslo, Norway) is an artist with a dynamic practice that spans painting, sculpture, poetry, and performance. Her works channel an energetic visual language, drawing inspiration from graffiti, cartoons, and art historical movements such as CoBrA and Abstract Expressionism. Found objects, cast materials, and vibrant color converge in her expressive compositions, marked by spontaneity and rhythm. Ekblad’s approach bridges the spontaneous and the monumental, the poetic and the visceral.
Ida Ekblad lives and works in Oslo. Her work is part of public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), Buffalo AKG Museum (Buffalo), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Hessel Museum of Art, (Annandale-on-Hudson), Kistefos Museum (Jevnaker), Migros Museum (Zurich), Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City) the National Museum of Norway (Oslo), Rubell Museum (Miami).
Ida Ekblad, SMOKIES SKYLAB (2020). Puff and plastisol on cotton, in artist’s frame. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.