Shimon Okshteyn: Smoking Hand, 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

“Okshteyn’s still lifes—objects whose life has been stilled—not only explore the boundary between ordinary objects and poetic objects—non-art and found art—but between aesthetics and erotics.”  ___Donald Kuspit, New York