By Tara Kyle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — The romantic, idealized landscapes of the nearly 200-year-old Hudson River School are getting injected with cell phones, scaffolding and scenes from 3D computer screen savers at a new exhibit in Chelsea.
In his acrylic and oil paintings, Israeli-born artist Shay Kun is adapting traditional nature scenes by 19th century masters like Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, and tweaking them with modern interventions that are sometimes subtle, and sometimes not. At his new show, "Exfoliation," on view at the Benrimon Contemporary, the effect is to create a treasure hunt for gallery goers.
"He's giving you an image that is a very typical landscape and adding atypical features that really challenge the viewer," said gallery owner Leon Benrimon.
While the Hudson River School, which was an American art movement emphasizing the beauty of the natural world, remains a mainstay of university art history curriculum, it has fallen out of vogue at auction houses and on the exhibit circuit.
"Shay's definitely elevating that period of art, which in our contemporary era of hype may be overlooked," said Benrimon.
In Kun's native Israel, landscape art carries a different connotation, which drives what he called a "natural repulsion" for the genre. During the country's infancy, some immigrants brought landscapes from Poland or Germany that others believed should have been left behind. Today, some Israeli landscape art is produced, but it tends to be either abstract in style or carry a political message.
But for Kun, whose Holocaust survivor parents are both trained as landscape painters, moving to London a decade ago and later New York provide more space to explore his attraction to the genre. Kun currently lives in Midtown Manhattan.
Among his works on display at the Benrimon Contemporary, some paintings in the Hudson River School style have such subtle additions that viewers might need a second glance to notice them.
In "The Intuitionist," a traditional, 19th century mansion dominates the canvas. The building seems completely within its period — until you notice the construction.
"There's scaffolding on this chateau. That makes no sense," said Benrimon. "But you look at that scaffolding, and you're so used to seeing it around New York City, at first it doesn't seem out of place."
Many of Kun's most recent works relegate the landscape to the background, and put the anachronistic addition into the spotlight.
"Armed and Dangerous," a 2010 painting, places a hot air balloon based on a 3D computer screen saver in its center. It's only after a closer examination that one finds a recreated Bierstadt field scene, twisted into each of the four corners.
As strongly as Kun's work is influenced by the masters of the Hudson River School, he borrowed as well from each of his parents. The celebratory style of his mother's paintings is visible, for example, in the red, white and blue balloons of "A Wrinkle in Time." His father's more morbid take on the natural world, meanwhile, can be seen in small, butchered cows in the foreground of "Liquid Swords."
"I infused in a sense an homage to both of my parents," Kun said. "I'm trying to combine the Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde landscapes."
"Exfoliation" will be on view at the Benrimon Contemporary, on the second floor of 514 W. 24th Street, through October 30.
