PRESENTS @
Basel, June 15-19, 2011
BOOTH H-2
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Black & White Gallery / 483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY PRESENTS Shimon Okshteyn (b. 1951, Ukraine. Lives & works in the USA since 1979) DANGEROUS PLEASURES Shimon Okshteyn’s visual world is unusually stimulating because its fastidious craftsmanship, strong compositional formats and unusual mixtures of materials lead to an inner world whose range is as complex as it is unpredictable and varied. His well-informed appropriationist tendencies are abetted by the artist’s urge towards classical traditions that balance gloomy introspection against outward looking strength. Add to this a coherent yet surprising use of thematic material, a richness of invention, and a systematized build up of narrative – all of these aspects make Okshteyn’s work irresistibly attractive to the eye – a haptic feast laced with metatonic power. Shimon Okshteyn’s recent work in the Dangerous Pleasures is a revelatory one. Executed in a traditional genre of still life, his extraordinary mimetic accuracy and signature hyper-realistic renditions of drug use and attendant paraphernalia only serve to heighten the indeterminacy of meaning that permeates his work. The paintings are structured as pictorial compositions whose realism is given a new meaning by the mirror on which each one is painted creating a highly subjective space marked by tension and melancholy. In this sense the work sustains itself with an aggressive involvement through reflective surfaces to suggest a dynamically invasive sense of self-monitoring, as well as the enlargement, distortion and splintering of the self under pressure. Okshteyn is one of those uncommon artists whose powers of verisimilitude (variously described by critical commentators as a post ironic fusion of magic realism, social realism and capitalist realism) and academic virtuosity has been honed over the years since the artist’s rigorous training at the Odessa Art Institute during the pre-Glasnost days. His aptitudes have been effectively retrofitted to serve a unique agenda: that of questioning the interplay between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary in a neuroticized capitalist wonderland of excess and consumerism. Shimon Okshteyn lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His works are in many museum and private collections, most notably in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. The work from Dangerous Pleasures was recently included in the Decadence Now! Visions of Excess exhibition curated by Otto M. Urban at the Galerie Rudolfinum and Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. Black & White Gallery was founded in New York in 2002. From the outset, the Gallery has been committed to cultivating promising artists in the initial and more advanced phases of their careers exploring contemporary themes and concepts through multiple mediums.
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Still Life With Cocaine oil on mirror 60"x 80" (152 x 203cm) 2008
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Drugs oil on mirror 42 "x 60" (107 x 152cm) 2008
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Ecstasy oil on mirror 37"x 49" (93 x 125cm) 2008
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Pills oil on mirror 43"x 49" (109 x 125cm) 2008
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Ashtray oil on mirror 60"x 75" (152 x 91cm) 2008
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Daily Dose oil on mirror 75 "x 50" (191 x 127cm) 2008
483 Driggs Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211 / t. 718 599 8775 / f. 718 599 8798 info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com / www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com