Israel Lund

Israel Lund (born 1980, Bellow Falls, Vermont) 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.^[1] His practice has been described as its “own distinctive kind of post-digital abstraction.”^[2]

Lund's work concerns the “modularity and scalability” of analog painting.^[1] As described by critic and art historian Alex Bacon, Lund's paintings evoke an uncanny “screen-space” that is produced in an “analog-mode” via a silk-screening process, a concept that the artist refers to as “analog.jpg”.^[3] In his recent work, this process involves imprinting the palette knife through a silk screen onto the warp and weft of raw, coarse canvas.^[4] The result is a dappled or “pixelated” miasma of cyan, magenta, and yellow.^[5] 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.”^[6]

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.”^[6]

The artist's background in hardcore punk, according to Ballard, brings a sense of musicality to bear on his work: “Lund is fond of the term noise, which here stands in well for texture, inscribing the work with a dissident musicality.”^[6] Laura McLean-Ferris alternately describes this aural quality as “the snow crash of white noise.”^[6] She writes: “What the noiselike qualities of Lund’s paintings, scatterings of buzz and drag, also powerfully resist is translatability, another historic signifying system that has classically been attached to painting.”^[6]

Israel Lund's work has been shown at The Rachofsky Collection, The Warehous, Dallas;^[7] David Lewis, New York;^[2] Lumber Room, Portland;^[8] Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna (BACO) in collaboration with Galleria d’Arte Modernae Contemporanea di Bersgamo (GAMeC);^[1] White Flag Projects, St. Louis;^[9] and The Power Station, Dallas;^[10] among others.

Lund's work is featured in the collections of the Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna (BACO), Bergamo, Italy;^[11] Bienecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, New Haven; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick;^[12] Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati;^[13] Cleveland Museum of Art;^[14] Dallas Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MoMA Library, New York; Phoenix Art Museum; Princeton University Art Museum;^[15] and the UBS Art Collection, Zürich.