Shay Kun

Shay Kun

Artist's Website

2010: Exfoliations

Shay Kun is an Israeli-born New York-based artist. He earned his B.F.A. at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1998), and went on to earn his M.F.A. from Goldsmiths College in London, England (2000). Kun has been showing extensively in the past several years nationally as well as on the international circuit, mainly across the U.S and Europe. The culmination of this process was the development of an acute awareness of his specific place in today's visual culture--somewhere between the historical concept of fine art and the contemporary digital and electronic imagery so central to his generation's experience.

The current series of works are an infusion, a hybrid of absurdities. Drawing on the sublime in western culture, capturing the grandeur of nature while acquiring a 'new look'; they are transformed into a juxtaposition of nature and its human invaders, who appear in the guise of adventure seekers. The contrast between these characters and their stylized environment is an abrupt and offensively inadequate substitute of noble bearing that fills their place in painting of past centuries. Still, what these visitors leave are their traces; they have not overwhelmed the environment and its magical possibilities.