LONDON.- Herald St presents Ida Ekblad’s second solo show at the gallery following the artist's gallery debut in 2010. For this two part show, across Herald St's main gallery space in E2 and its new temporary space on Golden Square, W1, the artist presents two different new bodies of work, both paintings.

At Herald St the gallery presents new works from the track series - paintings that come from an ongoing series that debuted in Ekblad's solo exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Norway 2013. In the exhibition the artist made a new series of sculptures in which she collected and fixed scrap metal into shopping carts which had poems and texts cut into their wheels. The track paintings were made by running the carts over the canvas, using them as both a performative tool, but also as a printmaking and painting device. A line is formed on the canvas from the wheels but within the line (visible to varying degrees) texts from the poems are inscribed. In the exhibition's new series of paintings Ekblad has used the trolleys once again to inscribe the paintings but this time the works have been overpainted and printed upon and so are richer, more layered and complex than the works that have come before, there is also a reduced palette, in most cases black and blue.

For Golden Square the gallery shows new works on canvas and paper from a completely new series. These paintings are made with a spray gun, and in some cases come out of abstraction into absurd figuration. Ekblad has always had a connection to folklore in her work and this is extended in these new works by referencing animals and humans in a particular way, cartoon cats and dogs and aliens that accept and embrace a childlike and teenage range of references. These images and moments often seem dreamlike, playful and absurd and could seem at odds with the world of abstract painting.