The Estate of Shimon Okshteyn presents a new exhibition of a group of artworks spanning Okshteyn’s career from 2000 to 2018. The selection of paintings, collages, sculpture and assemblages showcases his interest in everyday objects by redefining the medium as it relates to process and mark-making.
In 1990 Okshteyn moved from a bucolic New England town to New York City. The many things with which people, especially in the city surround themselves, prompted his interest in used everyday objects expanding his understanding of his new culture. Like many other young artists at that time he visits flea markets, collects discarded objects and integrates them into his art, directing our gaze to the aesthetics of everyday life.
His first cut into the painting surface occurred in 2000. The paintings of lilies and thimbles that follow feature rough cuts and piercing. By cutting the surfaces open, Okshteyn does not seek to destroy the painting. His goal is to expand the possibilities of the image and instead of painterly illusion to open up a dialogue with the real space. For Okshteyn, the mysterious effect this creates is important. He increases it by backing the canvas with dark, thin fabric behind the cut. This intensifies the contrast between the surfaces of the paintings and unfathomable darkness looming behind the open cuts. Suddenly the image becomes an object.
For Okshteyn there was a natural progression from the Lilies and Thimbles paintings to the Loveseat and Combs assemblages, as two-dimensional collage and eventually three-dimensional objects came to the fore. Expanding on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, Okshteyn imbued new significance to such ordinary objects as a loveseat, comb or a pile of junk on a bar stool by combining unrelated items and incorporating them into the context of art.
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“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. Although one can observe a noticeable difference between the earlier 'School of Paris" canvases that he painted in the Soviet Union and the women and still-life composition that he now paints in America.”
____ Eduoard Roditi, 1990
"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."
___Richard Muhlberger, Director, G.W.V. Smith Art Museum, Springfield, MA, 1987
"...as to the sociological or even symbolic truth of Shimon Okshteyn’s works, one cannot emphasize strongly enough how terrifying the beauty of these very modern sirens is used with cold efficiency and icy precision which about 50 years ago characterized such German artists as Otto Dix, Raderscheidt or Christian Schad of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Artists from the Weimar republic were also confronted with a profoundly demoralizing world which some among them thought to denounce by the impeccable precision of their style. In fact, they did more than that. Like Shimon Okshteyn today, they light up for us the depth of the human heart."
___José Pierre, Paris, 1985
"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, 1999
ARTIST
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 museum solo exhibitions took place at 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 Transit. Russian Artists between the East & West, Nassau County Museum of Art (1989-1990), New Acquisitions, Brooklyn Museum of Art (2001), Approaching Objects: Works from the Whitney Museum Permanent Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (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.
In 2022 Shimon Okshteyn's works were included in the New Acquisitions exhibitions at the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI and Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA.
During his successful career Shimon Okshteyn was represented by several international galleries, most notably by OK Harris Works of Art, NYC, Robert Sandelson, London, UK, Le Centre d’Art Vaas, Vence, France, Triumph Gallery, Moscow, Russia, K Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia, Venet House Gallery, Ulm Germany, Stux Gallery, NYC. Since Stux Gallery closed in 2016, the work of Shimon Okshteyn, who died in 2020, has been without representation.
ESTATE
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, 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.