Israel Lund

By Paul Wagenblast

There's something familiar about Israel Lund's work, a built in memory you can't quite trace, peering into the static of a television or the pixels of a familiar JPEG. While his tongue-in-cheek paintings of Xeroxes of his own paintings of Xeroxes play into the banality of post-post-modern art's pillar of self-referential commodity, they are presented with a certain grandeur and beauty that eventually betrays their blatancy, and simultaneously exposes and negates their intimacy. Process painting in the Meta age produces a result that is both serial and nebulous, critical and trivial, which Lund's work manages to comment on with humor and visceral splendor. Like Warhol's Pop silkscreens in an age where the subject of celebrity finally been nullified, or replaced, instead, by the artist's own ego. Lund has a history of reproducing his own property, whether created, worn or found by him; using zines, books, sculpture and internet portals like Tumblr to distribute his work, gaining him an underground and international notoriety. Rob e rts&T lit on marks his first solo show, which opened Saturday at Roberts & Tilton gallery in Los Angeles, and he is currently exhibiting in group shows at both Galerie Torri in Paris and Middlemarch in Brussels. We caught up with him on opening night in LA for a few questions about his work.

By Haley Rosen Cohen

Rob e rt s&T ilt on—don’t worry, they meant to write it that way.

Let the spaced out, mixed up title of Israel Lund’s new exhibition at Roberts & Tilton be a precursor to prepare you for a visit to the gallery. You’ll find some works hung closely together, others spaced significantly far apart, and overall, find yourself challenging the context in which the paintings are shown—just as Lund intended.

While Lund subverts the concept of a traditional painting show, he also toys with ideas of classic printmaking techniques. His layered process begins by silkscreening onto raw canvas, resulting in a single black and white painting. After he photographs the painting with his iPhone, he converts it to a PDF, and then enlarges through Photoshop. Once the image is printed, Lund burns it onto a screen which he then silkscreens back onto the raw canvas. The result is a textured, conceptual work that the gallery likens to the dots of Lichtenstein, the shadow paintings of Warhol, and the luminosity of Richter—and they couldn’t be more spot on. Contemporarily, I also see dialogue with his Angeleno peers exploring conceptual imaging and technology such as Andrea Longacre-White and Nathan Hylden. But really, you should see for yourself at the opening tomorrow night and let me know later.