Haim Steinbach

 

Rehovot 1944

 

My work is related more to the tradition of the art of representation. I’m not an actor but my work is the presentation of objects that make characters. [...] My work it is associated with this idea, even though I don’t present human beings but objects. They move when someone moves them and we do it continually, every day. (H. Steinbach, 1998)

 

Born at Rehovot in Israel in 1944. In 1957 he settled in the United States, where he produced minimalist canvases featuring straight lines on monochrome grounds. Elements of everyday life gradually began to enter his work and in 1976, in an exhibition at the Artists Space in New York, he presented a series of objects on a shelf and a kettle of water set on a pedestal, with the bases forming a unified work. Since then his work has consisted in exhibiting systematically the world of consumerism through objects of different kinds found or picked off the street, which the artist appropriates to give rise to a sort of sign alphabet of contemporary desire. In his works from the early eighties the shelves were hand-made, but since 1984 they have been given standardized forms depending on the dimensions of the objects they support, acquiring a new formal rigor. In the following decades he explored the relations between people, objects and places through the construction of specific types of exhibitions, with which he took part in major international events, such as Documenta 9 at Kassel in 1992 and at the editions of the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 1997. In 1999 he was visiting professor at the Advanced Course in Visual Art at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como. In 2000 he exhibited at Sydney Biennale. He lives and works in New York.