Liva Isakson Lundin, who was educated in Stockholm and currently works in New York City, creates environments that respond to their sites with great sensitivity. Her installations and sculptures are inspired by Modernism’s century-long legacy, but their formalism is invested with a searching energy and emotional resonance that are thoroughly contemporary. Many of her abstract works are made or finalized in their exhibition spaces. In many cases, the surrounding architecture serves as a supporting element, allowing her to push the physical properties of metal, rubber, and glass and experiment with ways of holding up a structure or holding on to a movement. Temporary expressions of form, Lundin’s works capture fleeting states of mind. Industrial materials transform, deform, and stabilize each other in intimate constructions composed of equal parts emotion and control, gesture and restraint, reliance and independence.
Jonathan Goodman: Both of your parents are artists based in Stockholm. How did they influence your turn to sculpture?
Liva Isakson Lundin: My parents have practices in the fields of theater, music, and multidisciplinary art. So, I was lucky to have grown up with a lot of art in different forms, often going with my parents to plays and concerts and sitting in on rehearsals and studio recordings. They were very encouraging when I had creative ideas. We did a lot of projects together, and I collected a lot of very useful junk in my room, which was probably just as messy as my studio is today . . .
. . . Subscribe to print and/or digital editions of Sculpture to read the full article.
