Elana Kundell’s artwork has been exhibited at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, CA for the Fresh! Art Auction, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) Artists Gallery, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and in galleries in the United States and in Korea. She has received grants including a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and three Ventura Music Festival commissions. Her artwork resides in numerous private collections in the United States and abroad.
Kundell studied art at the University of California at Santa Cruz as well as Painting and Sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy. She lives and works in Southern California.
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“Elana Kundell is the first to admit that one can’t invent what already exists in nature — but one can certainly claim it, renew it, and make it personal. Her rather opulent and evocative abstract paintings operate like tiny ecologies, deftly resembling landscapes and atmospheres despite being resolutely non-figurative. Densely detailed, cracking with life, creating paradoxical pictorial space, and appealing to the brain’s atavistic pattern-seeking, Kundell’s paintings trigger a deep sense of recognition but remain ambiguous. The rich and emotional array of cool, earthy, fiery, and jewel-like colors sewn into these “landscapes” make their atmospheres seem familiar, despite being fanciful and invented. Her topographical surfaces have a geological sparkle yet are obviously made of paint wielded by a person — rather than, say, contoured by centuries of exposure to the elements — so that viewers end up thinking about art-making in a general, philosophical, even esoteric way in addition to contemplating the compelling physical terrain of her pigment.”
-Shana Nys Dambrot, Huffington Post, January 2014
“The varieties of colors in the collection are not limited in any sense or fashion as exploration of every level is taken on; a brooding sense of red, a dystrophic yellow glowing from behind a sheared brown, a crag of concrete-gray jutting from a puddle of black and green. Images that are not to act as ink blots, to be interpreted differently by each individual, but images so precise in their fields of abstractness that particular emotions are inevitable and are remembered as a sense of wonder and beauty.”
– Christopher Burkett, d-visible magazine, Feb 2007