Shimon Okshteyn: Memory, 1980
SHIMON OKSHTEYN
Memory #3 | Don’t Forget There Are Relatives Series
Pencil on paper
27″x 23″
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Four drawings in this series are of the old Jewish cemetery in the artist’s native town in Ukraine – Chernivtsi. The cemetery has been long closed and is weed-choked. The drawings offer haunting testimony to how much the memory of this once vital Jewish community has been relegated to an almost abandoned past.
“Rigorously trained in the art institutes of the Soviet Union, Okshteyn had acquired before coming to the United States a great mastery of the techniques of drawing, composition and painting. …His first few years in America are represented in his work by brief but rapid period of transition, which appears to have ended in 1983, when he began to depict some of these women whom I might be tempted to call, according to an old American popular song, his “Hard-hearted Hannahs”.” ____ Edouard Roditi, Los Angeles