Shimon Okshteyn. Dialogue with Objects

"The Dialogue With Objects" retrospective of Shimon Okshteyn displays the artist’s work for the quarter of the century of his life in the United States. Shimon Okshteyn was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine in 1951. In 1970 he graduated from the Mitrofan Grekov Art Institute in Odessa. His family emigrated from the USSR in 1979. Since 1980 he has lived and worked in the USA, first in Springfield (Massachusetts) and then in New York since 1989. He encountered the problem of self-definition and assimilation in another cultural space like the majority of the artists who moved to the West. Since the early days he started absorbing the external environment greedily. Okshteyn did not hold onto the past, but took the best from it: school of academic drawing, virtuosity of a painter and a draughtsman and a close attention to realistic details. In his work he combines academic training and dot drawing with a new feeling and approach to the subject. Natalia Kolodzei, art historian and collector, remarks: "As a newcomer from another culture, Okshteyn brings actual figurativeness of American culture into his artworks. Balancing between the high and the low, public and private, Okshteyn expresses his reality in his work. He is the barometer of time, a keen and sensitive observer who defines where the artistic interest of the epoch moves."