Haim Steinbach (Rehovot, Israel, 1944) moved with his family to the United States in 1957 to New York City, where he still resides. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute (1968) and an MA from Yale (1973).
Since the 1970s, Haim Steinbach's art has focused on the selection and arrangement of objects: in particular, everyday objects. To bring them to light, Steinbach creates display devices, presentation structures. Ranging from the natural to the ordinary and from the artistic to the ethnographic, the artist explores the psychological, aesthetic, cultural and ritual aspects of objects and their contexts. Through his peculiar mode of presentation, the artist shapes works aimed at emphasizing the identity contained in the objects themselves and the meanings created through their interaction. Through this process, the artist has redefined the status of the object in art.
In the exhibition or display, the wall, shelf and object are used as indicators reflecting everyday social, cultural and political life. Objects of both functional and purely aesthetic types become the key elements of Steinbach's art practice, "It is about reflecting the object as 'set up': 'display' is presentation," said the artist. "It is the awareness of being present and participating in the rituals of communication, in the preparation, arrangement, selection and arrangement of things."
Since 1990, Steinbach has also exhibited fragments of found texts, keeping the same font and layout but enlarging the entire image. The artist considers these sentences as part of his collection of objects. Steinbach said he has "a collection of sentences, mostly slogans, from pages of magazines, books and other printed material in general. What interests me is the play in which language becomes image and image becomes language."
In more recent years, the artist investigates the mutability of an object's own meanings, relative to color and form. In particular, the ways in which architecture is an object beyond its appearance, shape, color or size. Like architecture, the object also occupies space, whether it is the interior or exterior of a volume. Using simple building materials-metal profiles and colored plasterboard-Steinbach shows us the representation of walls within space. By reconfiguring space in this way, the artist asks us to reorient our relationship with that man-made environment to which we usually pay no attention. Here architecture comes to the fore, reminding us that it itself is composed of culturally relevant materials and surfaces.
His first solo museum exhibition was in 1988 at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux. For Documenta IX (1992), Steinbach borrowed and exhibited some objects owned by Jan Hoet, the director of Documenta. He also participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1997), the Lyon Biennale (2000) and the Paris Triennale (2012). Major exhibitions of his work have been hosted at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum (with Ettore Spalletti, in 1993), Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (1995), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (1997-98), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2000), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2005). In 2012 for six months the Artist's Institute in New York devoted a series of exhibitions to the artist's work. In 2013 the exhibition ‘Once Again the World is Flat’, hosted at CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, was then in 2014 at Kunsthalle Zurich and Serpentine Gallery, London. In 2018-2019, the exhibition ‘Every Single Day’ was presented at Museum Kurhaus, Kleve and Museion, Bolzano.
A city-wide exhibition curated by Cristiana Perrella. After Procida and Monopoli, ITALICS brings to L’Aquila the third edition of Panorama, the traveling diffuse exhibition that since 2021 has been connecting art, architecture, antiquity and the contemporary with the territory and its communities, and for the second year has been sponsored
Focused on sculpture and works on paper, Ecstatic adds another dimension to the museum-wide presentation of the Hammer Contemporary Collection. The exhibition is organized around two distinct installations that emphasize the role of each medium within the scope of the museum’s collecting.
The exhibition celebrates Hopps’s interest in photography, a hobby since childhood, which was reignited when he met William Christenberry, who in turn introduced him to two foundational figures in American photography, William Eggleston and Walker Evans. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hopps continued to showcase emerging artists such as Gretchen
UCCA presents “Somewhere Downtown,” a group exhibition celebrating the creative ferment of Downtown New York in the 1980s and spanning mediums including graffiti, painting, drawing, photography, film, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition features the work of icons such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Cindy Sherman alongside that of lesser known trailblazers,
Marina Abramović, Vanessa Beecroft, Paolo Icaro, Alfredo Jaar, William Kentridge, Joseph Kosuth, Domenico Antonio Mancini, Luca Monterastelli, Ugo Mulas, Thomas Ruff, Wael Shawky, Haim Steinbach, Ettore Spalletti, Gian Maria Tosatti, Tobias Zielony, Gilberto Zorio
Lia Rumma Gallery will be exhibiting at Art Basel from September 20 to 26. You can find us at booth A1 | hall 2.0 and in Unlimited with “Rosa delicata” by Ettore Spalletti – booth U7 | hall 1.0
