Ida Ekblad

Ida Ekblad was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1980 and lives and works there today. She studied fine art at Central Saint Martins in London from 2000 to 2001, then earned a BA in 2005 and an MA in 2007 from the National Academy of Art in Oslo, now the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. In 2008 she continued her studies at the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles.

Ekblad gained international visibility early, included in the New Museum's Younger Than Jesus in 2009. Her work has since appeared twice at the Venice Biennale, in the group exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Biennale in 2011 and again in 2017. Museum solo exhibitions have followed at a steady pace, including the Museum of Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo (2013), Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Kunsthalle Zurich (2019), and Kunsthaus Zurich (2024). She is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, with galleries in Berlin, Paris, and London, and by Karma International in Zurich, and has also shown with Greene Naftali in New York.

Institutional interest in Ekblad's work has built steadily since her early inclusion in Younger Than Jesus and the 54th Venice Biennale, both read at the time as signals of a rising international generation. Subsequent museum solos, at the National Museum of Norway, Kunsthalle Zurich, Museo Tamayo, and Kunsthaus Zurich among others, have reinforced a critical picture of an artist who treats painting and sculpture as interchangeable and who folds poetry directly into her visual practice. Her use of industrial, urban, and salvaged materials, worked into paintings and cast into bronze, is consistently framed as central to her identity rather than incidental to it. Her selection for the Hepworth Wakefield survey in 2026, traveling on to Aalborg in 2027, extends that critical trajectory into a larger institutional platform.

Ekblad's documented auction high is Untitled, sold at Christie's London on 13 February 2020 for GBP 81,250 (roughly USD 105,000). That remains her only widely reported auction record as of mid-2026, and no later sale is documented as surpassing it. Norwegian press coverage has described her among the country's better-selling living artists through galleries and private sales, but without naming a specific transaction, so that figure is not treated here as an auction data point. Her market activity to date appears concentrated in the primary market, through her galleries and direct acquisitions by institutions, rather than in a developed secondary auction record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Ekblad's work, and verification runs through her representing galleries, Galerie Max Hetzler and Karma International, and through direct institutional relationships rather than a published certification program. Her auction record is thin: a single widely cited high-water mark from 2020 is the clearest public benchmark, and the small number of tracked sales means any single result should be read with caution rather than as a settled price trend. Her strongest signal of durability is her growing museum exhibition history and the scale of her upcoming institutional survey, both of which point to a market that is likely to develop further as her public exhibition record grows.