Black & White Gallery / Project Space presents Shimon Okshteyn: The Artist Estate / Part 2, on view from June 7 to July 26, 2025. Featuring twenty three artworks from 1984 to 2000, the exhibition brings together a suite of sculpture, collage, print, installation, and especially painting produced by Shimon Okshteyn from 1984 — a pivotal point in his career — when he moved away from the French inspired academic approach of expressionism to create the complex body of work in diverse mediums centered on visual motifs that recurred throughout the four decades of art making.
With loans from private collections and works from the artist's estate many of which will be presented to the public for the first time --- the exhibition highlights our deep dive into Shimon Okshteyn's practice and offers a well-rounded picture of the artist, his work, and his legacy.
“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.