'There Are Many Forms But Few Classics,' the Art of Shimon Okshteyn

Black & White Gallery/Project Space in Southampton Village presents its inaugural exhibition of works from the estate of the trailblazing American-Ukrainian artist Shimon Okshteyn. “The Artist Estate/Part I: There Are Many Forms But Few Classics” opens with a reception on Friday, March 21, from 6 to 8 p.m. and features a selection of work curated from the estate that was created by Okshteyn from 1976 to 2019. The show is on view through May 17.

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, Russia and 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, 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 United States in1980. Separated by time and space from the Russian modernists of the 1920s 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 Dali and Andy Warhol, those very few masters of contemporary art whose sardonic comments on our economy of consumption lend themselves readily to the more commercial art of advertising. As Richard Muhlberger, Director of the G.W.V. Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, 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 1990s Okshteyn rose to prominence with his hyper-real black and white graphite paintings and large scale sculpture 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 of Long Island 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. In 2014, Kristine Stiles, Curator, Rauschenberg: Collecting & Connecting, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC wrote, “The same year that Rauschenberg painted Wild Strawberry Eclipse, the Ukrainian artist Shimon Okshteyn created There Are Many Forms But Few Classics (1988). The left side of the large, polished, steel diptych contains only the neon words of the title and its reflective surface that makes the viewer part of the picture, while the right side sports Okshteyn’s photorealistic painting of a “classical tire,” painted during the period when he was interested in depicting “classical objects like women’s lips, part of a shoe” and so on. As viewers’ reflections merge with the light from the neon title, they become part of the “many forms,” perhaps equally suggesting that people are, in their own ways, “classics.”

Highlights in the presentation will 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 in1980, 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, Southampton Art Center.

Black & White Gallery/Project Space is at 4 North Main Street in Southampton. For more information, visit blackandwhiteartgallery.com.