The Tel Aviv Museum of Art – Until 27 December 2025

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. 

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.