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)