HONORING AND PRESERVING ARTISTIC LEGACY
SHIMON OKSHTEYN
(1951-2020)
The aim of The Shimon Okshteyn Estate is to promote and further the legacy of the artist, and by doing so, highlight his work and identity. The past four years have been dedicated to ensuring representation of Okshteyn in major museums such as Flint Institute of Art, MI, Grinnell College Art Museum, IA, and The Telegraph, Prague, Czech Republic. This remains the primary objective of the Estate, along with archiving and making the vast assemblage collection of the Estate available to scholars, artists, collectors and the general public through exhibits and publications.
Born in Ukraine, Shimon Okshteyn has lived and worked in the USA since 1980. His work has been the subject of many exhibitions since his US debut retrospective exhibition in 1987 at the G.W.V. Smith Museum, Springfield, MA. Other solo exhibition highlights include Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA (2002) The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, companion show to Natura Morta: Still-Life Painting and the Medici Collections (2007). His works were included in New Acquisitions: Brooklyn Museum of Art (2001), Approaching Objects: Works from the Whitney Museum Permanent Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2003), Extra-Ordinary: Everyday Object in American Art, New York State Museum, Albany, NY (2005), Leaded: The Materiality and Metamorphosis of Graphite, traveling exhibition: University of Richmond Museum, Richmond, VA, Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA, Salina Art Center, Salina, KS (2007-2009), Here’s the Thing: The Single Object Still Life, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, (2008). In 2010 several of Okshteyn works were on view at the Galerie Rudolfinum and Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague in the Decadence Now! Visions of Excess exhibition along with such notable artists as Jeff Koons, Gilbert and George and Chapman Brothers. In 2014 several of his installations from the permanent collection of the Nasher Museum at Duke University were on view at Duke in the summer blockbuster show Connecting and Curating organized by the Rauschenberg Foundation. During his successful career Okshteyn was represented by several international galleries, most notably by OK Harris and Stux Gallery. Since Stux Gallery closed in 2016, the work of Shimon Okshteyn, who died in 2020, has been without representation.
“Shimon Okshteyn’s visual world is unusually bracing because its fastidious craftsmanship, strong compositional formats and unusual mixtures of materials leads us to an inner world whose range is as complex as it is unpredictable and varied. In other words what we have here is a sophisticated and ultimately mature art form that expresses and exposes in equal measure. Okshteyn is a force to contend with. His well-informed appropriationist tendencies are abetted by the artist’s urge towards classical traditions that balance gloomy introspection against outward looking strength. Add to this a coherent yet surprising use of thematic material, a richness of invention, and systematized buildup of narrative — all of these aspects make Okshteyn’s work irresistibly attractive to the eye —a haptic feast laced with mega tonic power.”
___Dominique Nahas, New York City, 2019
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