Sasha Okun: Corpus
Sasha Okun's (b. 1949, Leningrad, present-day St. Petersburg) artistic practice is anchored in the tradition of classical European painting—from the Italian Renaissance, through Baroque and Rococo, to Realism and early modernism. His enduring dialogue with the past opens a window to the present, intertwining mythical moments with the bureaucratic monotony of everyday life.
Okun received his artistic training at the Higher Institute of Art and Industry, Leningrad in the early 1970s, a period marked by tight government supervision. He joined dissident art circles and found himself persecuted by the regime. In 1979, he immigrated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem, where he has lived and worked ever since. Over decades of teaching drawing at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Okun has mentored generations of students.
The exhibition Corpus presents a selection of works from recent years centered on the human condition—on bodily desires, aging, and decline. The figures populating Okon's paintings—primarily family members and acquaintances—are rendered with unflinching realism. Theatrically staged, they appear in tragicomic scenes and quasi-religious rituals. His close-ups of the body as "flesh," often exaggerated, trace the struggle of the corporeal body with its inevitable transience.
Throughout his long career, Okun's extensive oeuvre has introduced a different body—fleshy, plump, and charged with sensuality—in stark contrast to the restrained, ascetic body that has prevailed in Israeli art. The corpus—Latin for both living body and corpse—signifies a visceral painterly presence that unsettles the familiar or readily understood, confronting us with a grand human drama.
Sasha Okun, The architect Moulie Rabinovitz and his neighbors Hannah Zeituni and Pessia Minz, 2024
Graphite and silver chalk on paper, 219×155 cm
Gift of Artso Limited, UK
Courtesy of the artist and Artso Limited, UK.