Black & White Gallery / Project Space Presents Works From The Estate Of Artist Shimon Okshteyn

Black & White Gallery / Project Space held its inaugural presentation of works from the Estate of the trailblazing American-Ukrainian artist Shimon Okshteyn. An opening was held on Friday, March 21.

“The Artist Estate / Part 1 / There Are Many Forms But Few Classics” features a carefully curated selection of work from the Estate created by the artist from 1976 to 2019. This is the first presentation of Okshteyn’s works since his passing in 2020. His work has previously been shown at galleries in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, as well as at Stux Gallery and OK Harris Works of Art in New York City.

The spotlight of this exhibition is on Okshteyn’s career-long inquiry into how process and material experimentation created entirely new ways to find images. Featuring 21 works from the Estate, the exhibition traces Okshteyn’s artistic evolution, from his early cityscapes and figurative paintings to his iconic black and white graphite paintings and late vibrant abstract landscapes.

Okshteyn, born in Ukraine in 1951, came to the USA in 1980. 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 the 1980s, Okshteyn found himself in the company of such major contemporary artists as Salvador Daly and Andy Warhol. 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 the 1990s, Okshteyn rose to prominence with his hyper-real black-and-white graphite paintings and large-scale sculptures 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 The range of subjects Okshteyn painted and sculpted over the years — from old hats and clothing to out-of-date appliances to high-class comestibles — revealed his own unfolding interaction with life in the United States after his years in the Soviet Union.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, 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.

Highlights in the presentation include the artist’s self-portrait (1976), three landscapes painted 39 years apart, one of the Okshteyn’s native Ukrainian town, restoring the memory of his native land, the first work created upon his arrival to this country in 1980, and two small abstract paintings inspired by the natural landscape around his studio on Long Island, the last work he painted; two installations “Hamptons Polo” (2018) and “Reflections “(2007); nine graphite figurative and abstract paintings and one sculpture Comb (1997 – 2003); four portraits of contemporary young women he photographed in Brooklyn (2014), and a group of selfie sculptures rendered in resin and fiberglass (2010).

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, and Southampton Art Center.