Israel Lund

Israel Lund was born in 1980 in Vermont and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, completing the degree in 2010, and an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey, completing that degree in 2013.

Lund's paintings begin as digital files: photocopies, PDFs, and images manipulated through smartphone apps and photo-editing software. He enlarges and reworks these images before translating them into truncated silkscreens, printed in layers directly onto unstretched, raw canvas. Critics have described the resulting paintings, which read as blurred, grid-like fields of color, as a form of "post-digital abstraction," and a 2014 Brooklyn Rail essay framed his output as a kind of analog JPEG, a physical object carrying the visual residue of digital compression and manipulation.

He had his first solo exhibitions with David Lewis Gallery in New York starting in 2014, and followed with solo presentations at The Power Station in Dallas and White Flag Projects in St. Louis in 2015, a group exhibition organized with Base Arte Contemporanea Odierna and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo in Italy in 2016, and a solo show at Lumber Room in Portland spanning 2016 to 2017. A two-person exhibition with Amy Granat followed at 88 Eldridge Street in New York in 2017. He has continued to be included in group exhibitions in New York, including a 2025 summer group show at Van Doren Waxter.

Critical attention to Lund has centered on his method rather than on a body of published reviews with strong, quotable verdicts. Writers have grouped him with the post-internet cohort of painters working in the early 2010s who translated screen-based and photocopied source material into physical paintings, and the Brooklyn Rail discussed his work in that context in a 2014 essay describing his paintings as a kind of analog JPEG. His process, moving an image from smartphone app to Photoshop to a truncated silkscreen on raw canvas, has been the consistent throughline of institutional and gallery texts describing his practice as "post-digital abstraction."

Public auction data for Lund is thin and not fully documented in the sources available. Auction-database aggregators show more than one hundred lots at auction over the years, but detailed prices, works, and dates are not consistently accessible, and no single sale can be confirmed as his all-time auction high as of 2026-07-16. Press coverage from 2014, including a Bloomberg report on speculative "art flipping," described a Lund painting that changed hands four times in eleven months and gained more than 1,500 percent in value, though the report did not publish the specific prices, works, or venues involved. Other secondary references to a later sale as high as GBP 110,000 could not be corroborated with a work title, auction house, or sale date, so that figure is not treated here as a verified record.

Lund's market is small and largely undocumented in verifiable public auction records, and no confirmed all-time auction high could be established from available sources. Press reports from his early career describe a burst of rapid, speculative resale activity around 2013 to 2014, a pattern collectors should treat as a caution about volatility rather than as evidence of a stable price trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through David Lewis Gallery, New York, which has presented his work since 2014, matter more than they would for an artist with an established scholarly record.