Natural Landscape Painting

Shimon Okshteyn’s recent paintings is a multidimensional exploration of a state of mind where contradiction reigns. These landscapes capture the unusually stimulating visual world of Okshteyn’s practice, marked by fastidious craftsmanship, strong compositional formats and unusual mixtures of materials, all leading 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. Added to this a coherent yet surprising use of thematic materials, a richness of invention, and a systematized build-up of narrative—all of these aspects make Okshteyn’s work irresistibly attractive to the eye. This narrative is but one connective thread in Okshteyn’s rigorously conceptual art, which simultaneously embraces and critiques the interplay between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. His use of photographic images is never merely copies of the already available. Instead, they extract a kind of photographic unconscious from the image, bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making. As influential curator/critic Douglas Crimp noted in his historical essay Pictures, “…underneath each picture is always another picture.” Artist Statement In my varied and diverse approaches to making art; installations, paintings and sculpture my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between the different bodies of my work they are linked by recurring formal concerns and through the subject matter.  The subject matter of each body of work determines the materials and the forms of the work.  Each one often consists of multiple works, often in a range of different media, grouped around specific themes and meanings.  During research and production new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work.