Shay Kun (b.1974) - Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 2010.

Signed and dated on the reverse.

...

Shay Kun (b.1974) - Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 2010.

Signed and dated on the reverse.

98x66cm.

Shay Kun is an Israeli-American painter known for post-modern interpretation of the Hudson River School movement. He is the son of Israeli painter Zeev Kun.

Shay Kun was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, to Hungarian parents that survived the Holocaust, Zeev and Heddy Kun, both artists. Kuns first solo exhibition has been in Tel Aviv at age 18. He later studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1998) and received his masters at Goldsmiths, University of London (2000). Since then, he has been living and working in New York City.

His works has been exhibited worldwide, including solo shows at Linda Warren projects in Chicago, Benrimon Contemporary in New York, Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, Michael Schultz Gallery in Berlin, LaMontagne Gallery in Boston and at Hezi Cohen Gallery in Tel Aviv as well as numerous group shows, including at The 51st Venice Biennale, Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, Untitled gallery in New York, Fortes Vilaca Gallery in Sao Paulo, Leslie Smith in Amsterdam, and at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

Kun infuses traditional Hudson River School images of nature, particularly Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. His painstaking attention to detail and composition of fantasy landscapes on canvas are updated with contemporary mass production Pop art motifs, out of scale and perspective. Kuns hyperreality and postmodernism style creates a jarring utopia. In that respect, he inherited The Holocaust influence on his parents art. His mother paintings are utopian landscapes of an ideal world, while the paintings of his father, shows a dark world falling apart.

The New York Observer wrote: Elements that he incorporates into his brilliantly colored, sometimes gaudy canvases including brittle, biscuit-tin landscapes of the sort mass-produced in factories in Taiwan...The show Exfoliations, is further proof, like Mark Rydens recent show at Paul Kasmin, that the huge world of kitsch has become fair game for fine art.