Israel Lund

Israel Lund (born 1980) is a conceptual painter based in Brooklyn, New York. He creates acrylic paintings using a combination of digital and analog techniques including silk-screening; digital painting; and the manipulation of photocopies, photographs and PDFs through smartphone applications. His practice has been described as its “own distinctive kind of post-digital abstraction.”

Lund's work concerns the “modularity and scalability” of analog painting. In his recent work, this process involves imprinting the palette knife through a silk screen onto the warp and weft of raw, coarse canvas. The result is a dappled or “pixelated” miasma of cyan, magenta, and yellow. Thea Ballard describes Lund's regimented technique as “ascetic”:“This method is perhaps ascetic, following strict parameters of both process and dimension; most of his works conform to the dimensions of 8.5 x 11 inches (such economical tendencies nod to Lund’s roots in hardcore punk and zine-making). His initial experiments were rendered in black and white, but Lund also uses cyan, magenta, and yellow ink, a nod to CMYK printing, method commonly used reproduce photographs in print, in which these colors overlap to create a spectrum.” Working within a set of specific material constraints, Lund pushes painterly abstraction to its absolute limit. Ballard continues: “The canvas itself is less an endpoint than several (or maybe infinite?) portals or nodes through which these images are transferred.” David Lewis, New York; Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna (BACO) in collaboration with Galleria d’Arte Modernae Contemporanea di Bersgamo (GAMeC); and The Power Station, Dallas; among others.

Collections Lund's work is featured in the collections of the Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna (BACO), Bergamo, Italy; Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, New Haven; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MoMA Library, New York; Phoenix Art Museum; Princeton University Art Museum; and the UBS Art Collection, Zürich.