Shimon Okshteyn: Comb, 2000

“Shimon Okshteyn’s art has a hauntingly evocative quality that suggests nostalgia, captured moments, tender memories. With immense technical skill, he works in pencil and graphite, sometimes collage, as well as sculpture. As subject matter, hats and shoes and corsets of another era are depicted with rare finesse. Somehow, he is able to introduce an other-worldly quality to this work that often has the color and feel of early Daguerreotypes.”  ___Elaine Benson, Bridgehampton, NY

“This is a new kind of Pop Art. Engaging, shocking and baffling. Okshteyn’s purpose is to focus the world around him through an intense engagement with these objects and let nothing distract him in their contemplation. He is after all pursuing an headlong, relentless and probably impossible task, but in this battle to represent, to illuminate this past, this history, his being undistracted is a gift to us all.” ___Robert Sandelson, London