Shimon Okshteyn: Flower Hat, 2002

“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

“These drawings are also highly autobiographical. The range of subjects Okshteyn has painted over the years — from old hats and clothing to out-of-date appliances to high-class comestibles — reveal his own unfolding interaction with life in the United States after his years in the Soviet Union.”  ___ Ivan Karp, New York