Artist Ida Ekblad and singer Nils Bech run an alternative gallery space in their native Oslo called Willy Wonka Inc. In honor of their close collaboration and friendship, Bech wrote a song for Ekblad called “Vagabond Girl,” which has until now never received its most literal iteration. Ekblad is best known for her paintings and sculptures that play formal jokes by cutting across space in colorful, vibrating, indescribable forms. (These are currently on view in an excellent group show at Gavin Brown. But at her US solo debut at The Journal Gallery, Ekblad collected scrap metal and junk and sunk it into plaster forms. The results were elegant, quite human casts of a journey to a junkyard, and a playful investigation of the internal and external forms of a sculpture, and of object and base.
Here Bech performs at the dinner after Ekblad’s solo show at The Journal Gallery:
Europäisch-Amerikanische Freundschaft is on view through October 17. Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is located at 620 Greenwich Street. “Salty Sap Green Black” is on view through October 25. The Journal Gallery is located at 168 North 1 Street, Brooklyn, New York.
