A CONVERSATION WITH IDA EKBLAD

The thrill of the art critic’s word-chase mirrors aspects of Ekblad’s practice, which seems to exist in a permanent state of pursuit, of fertile, joyous dissatisfaction. Ranging from painting to scuplture and beyond, the works created by the Norwegian artist vibrate with an energy that feels both life-affirming and precarious, fixed forever in metamorphosis. The paintings for which the artist is perhaps best known seem to push against their confines, straining agaist the edges of the frame. They also defy the idea that painting is a flat, two-dimensional medium. Ekblad is famous for her use of plastisol and its variant, puff ink – two plastic pigments most commonly used for garment screen printing, which bulge out from the surfaces they are applied to.

The colours are vibrant but also restless and jangling: resisting easy harmonies, they dance among but not always with one another, each one asserting its proud independence.

Placed on the wall of one of the communal rooms at the heart of the family villa that predated the hotel, Ekblad’s new work feels like a dream of some long-distant summer. There’s a hint of candy-striped parasol, a suggestion of blue sea or sky, and fragments of a flower garden seen in multiple perspective, from those flat, childlike peonies, or perhaps camelias, to that very detailed, sculptural pink rose, caught in mid-skyfall or seafall. It’s all seen through a torn curtain of fabric or paper, whose intense indigo blues and sun-faded purples enact a kind of wistful nostalgia.

Born in Oslo in 1980, Ekblad works across painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and filmmaking. She has also created textiles and ceramics, designed furniture, and even started a record label with Norwegian DJ Karima F. Her influences reach far and wide from artists of the past such as Munch, Odillon Redon, Florine Stettheimer and Helen Frankenthaler to Japanese manga, street art, brand logos, fairytales, internet memes and a whole playlist of musical touchstones. Her work has twice featured in the Venice Art Biennale, in 2011 and 2017, and been showcased in dozens of international group and solo shows. World’s Largest Metaphor, Ekblad’s first major solo exhibition in the UK, will open at Hepworth Wakefield on 21 November 2026.

Artists at Le Sirenuse curator Silka Rittson Thomas caught up with Ekblad when she was in London putting the final touches to Eat an Eggplant, a solo show of the artist’s recent work at Galerie Max Hetzler. (The title derives from the mispronunciation of her name by the young son of fellow artist Joe Bradley). The result is a probing, wide-ranging conversation in which Ekblad talks us through her personal art-making process and illuminates its emotional and creative circuitry.

Silka: The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of your work is that it’s acrobatic – in so many ways. So I wonder if this is reflected in your practice when you’re in the studio. Do you begin bodies of works that you leap between, or do you focus on individual pieces?

Ida: I'm constantly moving between works in progress. But there isn't always a system. One thing that happens quite often is that one work gives birth to another. I might be painting a large canvas when suddenly a tiny detail catches my eye, and I realise that little fragment is a painting in itself. Then I want to make that painting. Sometimes I begin with a recipe or a plan, but somewhere along the way I abandon it. The work starts telling me what it wants instead.

Silka: So there's sort of a system that can be broken?

Ida: Yes. But sometimes there's not a system. I have a lot of different ways of working. And I also follow my gut instinct a lot. It's almost like cooking. I often feel my nose is my most important guide. During COVID I was honestly really afraid of losing my sense of smell because I feel like that olfactory sense is my most important centre of making art. And weirdly, memories feel like they're stored there together with scents, right?

Silka: Yes, the olfactory memory can be stronger than hearing or seeing, right?

Ida: Yes. I think one memory that a lot of people can relate to could be the scent in an old summer house that maybe their grandparents used to live in. I was a kid in the 1980s, but the drawers in our summer house had things still kept there from the 1960s, like a hairbrush and some perfume and there was this paper in the drawer with a kind of powdery, weird sixties smell. And then if the paper in that drawer had a pattern, like a simple rose pattern, then that would be something that I would kind of look for in my head or fantasise about and try painting. Painting is sometimes a way of remembering something that no longer exists except in the imagination.

Silka: There’s a clear line of repetition or rather continuity in your work. I’m wondering if your beautiful works on paper are part of this? Each one seems to be its own explosion of energy, but are they also precursors to the paintings?

Ida: Often yes, especially with the bigger paintings. But I learn a lot from doing watercolours or smaller oils because it's much more intimate and you can do it in other places than in the main studio. You can do it in your summer house or in a hotel. I spend a lot of time paying attention to how colours behave: how they bleed into one another, how one brushstroke changes the next, and how different surfaces and gestures can completely alter a painting.

Silka: There are so many layers of conversation in your paintings. It’s like you have a constant hunger for knowledge.

Ida: I always say I have hungry eyes! Very hungry eyes. I never want to stop gathering information. It can come from poems, novels, old archives, films, conversations, or just from walking down the street. I'm always looking. I'm a total ADHD-head. I find it incredibly hard to switch off.

Silka: What prompts you to move from one medium to another? To make, say, a sculpture rather than a painting?

Ida: There’s an element of deciding ‘I want to do this today’ but also an element of planning ahead with certain workshops. For example, unfortunately casting bronze is not really possible in Oslo anymore. So when I need to do that I go on a dedicated trip to St. Gallen or Düsseldorf. But I definitely also have those days where I want to go to the studio, I want to be alone, I don't want to answer my phone, and I want to just be in my space.

Silka: You also work a lot with everyday objects like shopping trolleys or iron stoves…

Ida: Yes, and I also like to make benches to sit on. Some places, like the old Kunsthaus Zurich, have this beautiful old-school furniture in their exhibition halls. Many new museums have really bad museum furniture. In those cases I would rather make custom furniture myself. The latest ones have my artists’ palettes embedded in them so visitors can literally place their butt-cheeks right on a palette.

Silka: You’ve had some experience of working in Italy before this Artists at Le Sirenuse commission, right?

Ida: A few years back, I was invited by an art collector to stay in this amazing house, this modernist house, in Sant'Ilario, near Genoa. I was making work there for the Venice Biennale. It was very rural, up in the hills, with all these donkeys, but really close to the coast – you could basically walk down to the beach to swim. And then I was making ceramics in Albisola, this little ceramics town.

Silka: What’s so beautiful about the painted part of the ensemble you made for Le Sirenuse is the way it almost expands into the room.

Ida: Yes! It feels like it was always there.

Silka: I wanted to ask you about the names you give your works. The two you made for Le Sirenuse are called Bathyal Belle Inflorescence and Succubus. That restlessness you are talking about seems to spill over into the titles you choose, which play with onomatopeia and phonaesthetics. In other words they are more about the feeling of words than their meaning. So with Bathyal Belle Inflorescence, we can think about bathing, and the sea, and the diving bell, but it’s also to do with this particular midnight surface, right?

Ida: Yes, but really far down, where it’s completely dark. I have a lot of fun choosing titles because it gives me an excuse to disappear down all these strange research rabbit holes. In the end, that research becomes another layer of abstraction. I read about these extraordinary creatures that live in the bathyal depths. They look completely insane—brilliantly coloured, almost like tiny paintings. They’re not really fish, but all sorts of bizarre deep-sea organisms that seem as though they’ve been invented rather than evolved.

Silka: And did the title come when you were painting, were you thinking about these creatures while doing the work?

Ida: Not while I’m making the work. The title usually comes at the end. It’s another kind of searching—almost as if I’m looking for a little lump of words that belong to or sometimes resists the painting. I often want the title to feel sculptural in itself. Belle came from roses, but it’s also such a wonderfully tacky word, so I pushed it together with bathyal because I liked the collision between something heavy and something light. After a while, though, I make so many works that I forget which title belongs to which painting. I actually love that. Forgetting becomes another layer of abstraction. The title starts to exist almost as an object in itself, carrying only faint traces of the research or the memories that first gave rise to it.

Portrait of Ida Ekblad © Ida Ekblad / BONO 26