TRIBUTE TO SHIMON OKSHTEYN | When I first spoke to Shimon Okshteyn about how I planned to discuss his art, I happened to mention, if only as an opening gambit, that I had already known of a number of other artists or writers of talent who came originally from his native city of Chernovitz or from other cities of the formally Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bukovina and Galicia which after World War I, were Romanian or Polish before ultimately becoming parts of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. ...a few of the more remarkable literary or artistic talents that have arisen from these distant and all too often despised provinces of Eastern Europe and whose names come to my mind as I consider how much of them in turn has contributed to the intellectual life of Austria, Germany, Poland or France and now, in the case of Shimon Okshteyn, to that of the United States. ___Edouard Roditi, “Shimon Okshteyn: An Innocent in America”, Los Angeles 1987 | Okshteyn’s paintings are dreams into which we fall as though into a dangerous wishing well. Okshteyn’s paintings are dreams, in which reality is charged with hope as well as despair — charged with emotional depth and complexity we never truly experience except when we dream.___Donald Kuspit | |
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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
Image: Red Profile | Oil on canvas, 1995
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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-wordly quality to this work that often has the color and feel of early Daguerreotypes.
___Elaine Benson, Bridgehampton, NY
Image: Straw Hat With Flowers | Graphite & pencil on canvas, 2002
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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
Image: Push Pin | Graphite on canvas, 2004
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Okshteyn knows how to take play out of Pop, where much of his work is rooted. He renders it joyless and at the same time more personal than we’re accustomed to seeing.
__Barbara A. McAdam, ArtNews
Mr. Okshteyn's large, grisaille photorealistic pictures are technically impressive, especially the ones made from graphite.__Ken Johnson, The New York Times
Image: After Willem Claesz, Heda Still Life, 1651, | Graphite & oil on canvas, 2005
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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. ___Dominique Nahas
Image: Extasy | Oil on canvas mounted on plastic mirror, 2008
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Landscape paintings capture the effect on the artist of the otherworldly quality to the nature of the East End of Long Island.
Image: Hamptons Landscape | Mixed media on canvas, 2018
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However that may be, 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. Such comparison for my part is not intended as a reproach, far from it. 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
Images: Partners, 1985 (left) | Legs, 1985 (right), limited edition lithographs
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