|
These paintings marked Okshteyn's appropriation of the still life genre in its strictest classical sense, as a depiction of inanimate objects - flowers, fruits, assorted kitchenware - reanimated with the artist's sole intention of exploring color, form, texture, and composition. Often denigrated as the province of Sunday painters, or at least politely overlooked in contemporary art as a hobbyist kitsch, the still life genre originated in the Renaissance and experienced its golden age in the 17th-century Netherlands.
Okshteyn, in choosing the still life genre almost four centuries later, clearly demonstrated the historical swapping of fashionable idols from the traditional Flemish manner of showing flowers and fruit as a tabletop sculpture in a placid celebration of domestic tranquility to mass-produced toys, comic heroes, and the latest gadgets in celebration of consumer culture and kitsch sensibility. The results are complex artworks filled with contradictions, where a deep sense of interiority is matched by implacable surface exteriority.
| 
