“Step Motherfucker”: the total art of Ida Ekblad

A new visual language

 

Whether she’s using collage or airbrush, Ida Ekblad expresses herself with vigour: “I might find myself on top of a mountain of rubbish and there’ll be 60 shades of green – metallic and rusty greens, deep greens and others that lean towards blue”, she says. In line with the situationists, she wanders around the city searching for material, looking at the rich pickings on the ground and the walls covered with graffiti. Painting, sculpture, film and performance might be her media of choice, but Ida Ekblad is above all a poet. Her visual language is based on experimental poetry that views lyricism as a sensitive object, quite independent of meaning. From this lyricism comes works inspired by abstract expressionism but also an underground culture that mixes music and literature.  

 

Step Motherfucker

 

Step Motherfucker is Ida Ekblad’s second exhibition in France as the Berlin gallery Max Hetzler shows new works by this liberated artist. Ida Ekblad lives and works in Oslo but is travelling more as exhibition demands increase, leaving her native Scandinavia for New York, the Venice Biennale with her show University of Disaster and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Her works are not unlike those of Kurt Schwitters, the embodiment of the Dada spirit, who substituted noble materials for detritus from municipal dumping grounds. Another glaring reference is Robert Rauschenberg, a supporter of total art, and his “combine painting”, audacious hybridisations of shapes, transformations of textures and surfaces. WithStep Motherfucker, contemporary artist Ida Ekblad gives us works whose shapes and colours mix tradition and pop culture.

 

Step Motherfucker

Paris: 57, rue du Temple, du September 2 au October 7, 2017