Haim Steinbach was born in Rechvot, Israel in 1944. Ever since the early eighties he has established himself as one of the most significant figures on the international art scene. He has taken part in important international events such as Documenta IX at Kassel in 1992 and the Venice Biennial in 1993 and 1997. Among the recent exhibitions to feature his works, we would like to highlight Artists’ Gifts at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Definitively Provisional at the Whitechapel Project Space, London in 2003, East Village USA, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in 2004, and In the Darkest Hour, There May Be Light at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2006. He currently lives and works in New York.
Haim Steinbach is known as an originator of an art practice that is based on the selection and arrangement of already existing objects. While the objects appear to be displayed, they are actually positioned as if they are staged, and their arrangement may be compared to a musical arrangement, Haiku, or concrete poetry. The choice of objects and their grouping reflect their typological affinities and metonymic relationships.
At Vistamare Steinbach exhibits a group of works of his recent encounters with objects from various people and places. For instance in the neighborhood of Ocean Beach in San Diego, California there are many antique stores and thrift shops which he often visits and where he found a variety of miniature bathroom fixtures as well as two tiny pitchers in the shape of a face. The face is somewhat distorted, extended and shaped to imply that the the pitcher is a person having feelings and even an opinion about existence, as if to say “I exist,” “I am alive.”
Another work titled “golden (for Felix)” consists of a selection of objects juxtaposed with a space full of gold candy wrappers which were part of a large carpet of hundreds of candies, remenants of a work by the artist Felix Gonzalez – Torres. As the intention of Gonzalez – Torres was to have visitors take and eat the candies, Steinbach’s desire is to save the left over wrappers and present them in a context that may allow for other unexpected narratives to take form.
Benedetta Spalletti asked Haim Steinbach to consider making a work with the Maiela stone which comes from Abruzzo. Stones are a part of the earth and the expanded landscape, but they are also quarried for various uses in the home, in cemetaries and as material for sculpture. When relationships develop, so does the imagination, and memory takes form in relation to experience and events. The artist develops a practice and a framework for generating works that capture moments of interaction in time and space. The activity of placing objects is a way of pointing to their significance. But is a stone an object? At Vistamare Haim Steinbach will continue his correspondence with Benedetta Spalletti about the Maiella stone through the act of placing it.