Haim Steinbach

Since emerging onto the international art scene in the early 1980s, Haim Steinbach (born, Israel 1944, lives in New York) has redefined the object of art through the selection and arrangement of everyday objects. The objects are presented on various supports: shelves, display cases, stud walls, and even scaffolding. Steinbach is known for the wedge-shaped shelf concept he devised in 1984. His laminated wood shelves are triangular in section. They distribute a wide range of objects that are part of the quotidian exchange of cultures and functions. As such their use and worth are suspended in favour of their anthropological, ethnographic, and phenomenological meanings. These functions operate in the framework of context and intervention. Steinbach’s practice is focused on the context of everyday living, from the home, to the gallery, or the museum. Like a rebus puzzle, the objects Haim Steinbach presents become the forms of visual language. Their poetic significance lies in the contrast of their ‘values’, in the social, aesthetic, and chromatic senses of the term. In this game of gaps between objects, the supports also play their part. Unlike a pedestal which elevates one object above others, a shelf, by  virtue of its horizontality, places them on an equal footing, thus offering the freedom to engage with objects without judgement or prejudice. Haim Steinbach’s practice has expanded over time to include a wide range of materials: strips of wallpaper, colour swatches, slogans, and literary fragments that are adhered directly to walls. These formats concern vernacular life and collective community space. For the artist, each object is a potential ‘monument’, able to summon up a history, an era, a bygone time. Through Haim Steinbach’s cultural anthropology, the use and exchange value of the smallest familiar or domestic object is transformed into an image referring to something that exceeds it. Like Proust’s madeleine which embodies the entire world of childhood, the object is larger than it appears, overflowing its immediate meaning and its inherent nature to become through art a figure of speech, metonymy, and allegory.

For his first solo exhibition in a museum in Belgium, Haim Steinbach presents a range of works over the course of his 40-year artistic practice. Among them he chose to include two important projects that he realised with Belgian art collectors: Display #31 – An Offering: Collectibles of Jan Hoet (1992), and 3 (2000), a display of three chairs, three cans of paint, and three paint brushes belonging to Herman Daled.