Chaos Born from a Childlike Slip of the Tongue: Ida Ekblad and “Eat an Eggplant” at Galerie Max Hetzler

Galerie Max Hetzler, London • June 3 – August 8, 2026

If a friend’s young child could not pronounce your name correctly and shouted “Eat an Eggplant!” at you, you would probably file it away as a cute memory. However, when it comes to the Norwegian avant-garde artist Ida Ekblad, this absurd slip of the tongue can transform into the manifesto of a solo exhibition in central London. Galerie Max Hetzler is hosting Ekblad’s solo exhibition, titled “Eat an Eggplant,” from June 3 to August 8, 2026. The slipperiness and coincidence of the name “Ida Ekblad” evolving into “Eat an Eggplant” summarizes the true character of the exhibition: the ruleless fluidity of the unplanned, of street culture, and of the material itself.

Ekblad confronts us with an interdisciplinary and highly poetic library of materials that challenges painting’s claim to two-dimensional flatness. In the exhibition, new oil-on-linen canvases stand alongside enamels wrought on steel surfaces, hand-painted bronze sculptures, and a massive glass lantern. In the artist’s world, ideas and forms refuse to remain static, constantly shedding their skins over time. Delicate lace motifs formed with thick, impasto paint or cast from heavy metal, alongside resin benches and glass surfaces that bend and refract light, transform into fluid vessels carrying Ekblad’s imagination. This is an experimental space where objects and images can substitute for one another.

A large bronze sculpture placed on the gallery’s street-facing first-floor balcony defines an entrance-exit threshold for the viewer before they even step inside. Contrasting with the weight of solid metal, this sculpture carries the dripping, fluid quality of watercolor; viewed from street level, it evokes a feeling that is both monumental and as transient as if it could fly away at any moment. The artist’s description of this work as having “an urgent but at the same time perishable quality” is a harbinger of the atmosphere inside.

Hidden Details of the Exhibition Space

• da SPETTACOLO Curtains: The gallery’s row of eight street-facing windows is closed off with lace half-curtains (tendine a mezza finestra) reminiscent of the style of old cafés. Specially designed by Ekblad, these curtains are embroidered with the words “da SPETTACOLO,” which means “of the Spectacle” or “Show” in Italian.
• Pieces on the Museum Table: Instead of traditional white pedestals, a large wooden museum table supports three hand-painted bronze sculptures. Painted with the artist’s vibrant color palette, these sculptures look as if they were torn alive as individual pieces straight from her canvases.
• Painter Benches: The iron frames of two sculptural pieces of furniture cast from turquoise and fuchsia-pink polyurethane also echo the lace patterns. Embedded inside these resin seats are paint-covered paper plates left over from Ekblad’s production process in the studio. The artist describes these bright plates as “palettes stuck under your buttocks, like fossils in amber.”
• Anamorphic Steels: In her new enamel works, anamorphic forms in similarly vibrant tones spread across steel surfaces with the instinctive, rushed, and raw energy of graffiti.

Having long been fascinated by the textural structure of snakeskin, Ekblad has brought these patterns onto her large-scale canvases as well. The rich layers of impasto oil paint, which the artist describes as “so thick it’s perverse,” give the paintings an almost three-dimensional sculptural feel. The letter-like shapes superimposed onto these dense textures are produced using a technique where words are cut out from magazines, leaving only the negative space; visually, they recall the typography and rebellious style of 90s underground rave flyers. The unceasing transformation of ideas into other forms holds vital importance for Ekblad.

In the second gallery room, a large and low glass lantern hanging from the ceiling scatters refracted, textured light across the space. A product of Ekblad’s recent technical explorations with glass, this lantern features glass powder applied to the glass as a pigment; areas of opacity and transparency are melted into one another, achieving the bright luminosity of watercolor. Feeding on that tension between control and spontaneity, intent and accident, Eat an Eggplant is the most instinctive and wide-ranging inventory of Ida Ekblad’s practice, spanning from electric urgency to ethereal serenity.

Born in Oslo in 1980, where she still lives and produces, Ida Ekblad has participated in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2017, alongside holding exhibitions at esteemed institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, KODE Art Museum, and Kunstnernes Hus. This new solo show at Max Hetzler clearly demonstrates how much of a dynamic flavor humor, slips of the tongue, and raw material can inject into the sterile world of contemporary art, which sometimes takes itself far too seriously.

Exhibition Details:

• Venue: Galerie Max Hetzler, London
• Artist: Ida Ekblad
• Exhibition Title: Eat an Eggplant
• Dates: June 3 – August 8, 2026
• Admission: Open to the public and free of charge