| Through our newly established exhibition space in Southampton, NY we will support The Shimon Okshteyn Estate granting the public greater insight into the artist’s life and career. In doing so, we hope to bring his work back into the spotlight and increase the visibility of his works within the local community and beyond.
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 few 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, Czech Republic. This remains the primary objective of the Estate, along with archiving and making the vast collection of the Estate available to scholars, artists, collectors and the general public through exhibits and publications..
Okshteyn, born in Ukraine in 1951, came to the USA in1980. Separated by time and space from the Russian modernists of the twenties and leaving behind the French inspired academic approaches of expressionism, produced a different impression of life around him. He was an artist who got stronger, his vision clear, a hidden intellectual who observed the world around him and showed it in his metamorphoses.
In 1980s Okshteyn found himself in the company of such major contemporary artists as Salvador Daly and Andy Warhol, those very few masters of contemporary art whose sardonic comments on our economy of consumption lend themselves readily to the more commercial art of advertising. As Richard Muhlberger, Director of the G.W.V. Smith Art Museum, Springfield, MA noted, “Shimon Okshteyn brings a personalization of an intensity that American art has not seen since Joan Sloan’s paintings of New York and its women.”
In 1990s Okshteyn rose to prominence with his hyper-real black and white graphite paintings and large scale sculpture of ordinary objects, both remarkable for depicting the object and the photograph of the object which served as the formal subject of the work. His handling of light in its encounter with dark opaque surfaces was extraordinary. These works were also highly autobiographical. The range of subjects Okshteyn painted and sculpted over the years — from old hats and clothing to out-of-date appliances to high-class comestibles — revealed his own unfolding interaction with life in the United States after his years in the Soviet Union.
Throughout his career, Okshteyn found inspiration for his art through a multitude of sources, including the landscape of the East End of Long Island where he lived since 1996. He maintained a deep interest in the work of Dutch Golden Age painters, particularly their ability to embed their works with that certain quality of light, and in contemporary German and English painters’ luminous gestures.
Okshteyn’s practice spanned painting, sculpture, drawing, lithography, and large-scale installation. When examining his work in these alternate mediums, the artist’s attentiveness to color and form becomes incredibly evident. In 2014, Kristine Stiles, Curator, Rauschenberg: Collecting & Connecting, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC wrote, “The same year that Rauschenberg painted Wild Strawberry Eclipse, the Ukrainian artist Shimon Okshteyn created There Are Many Forms But Few Classics (1988). The left side of the large, polished, steel diptych contains only the neon words of the title and its reflective surface that makes the viewer part of the picture, while the right side sports Okshteyn’s photorealistic painting of a “classical tire”, painted during the period when he was interested in depicting “classical objects like women’s lips, part of a shoe” and so on. As viewers’ reflections merge with the light from the neon title, they become part of the “many forms”, perhaps equally suggesting that people are, in their own ways, “classics”.
Over the course of his career, Okshteyn showed his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, Grinnell College Art Museum, G.W.V Smith Art Museum, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York State Museum, The Flint Art Institute, Katonah Museum of Art, Southampton Art Center.
“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, NYC, 2019
For more information and additional images, please contact the Estate / [email protected]
For sales inquiries, please contact Black & White Gallery / [email protected]
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