Artists

Haim Steinbach

Press release

n the mid 1980s two concepts crystallized in Haim Steinbach’s work. One is now so widely recognized that it has become paradigmatic, the structuralist shelf, with its variable scale and strict proportions offering a platform for the selection and arrangement of objects. The other is his work with found texts. Steinbach texts are found objects, they are redeployed with their original typefaces intact. Their scale and position are variable, but the character of the words and their given typefaces gives them a dimension of orality that is crucial to their meaning. We hear them when we see them. This becomes explicit in a work like beep honk toot, 1989. It is as if the typeface is designed to express the tone of the phrase in a way that might be analogous to the facial expression of a speaker.

On the occasion of his exhibition beep honk toot at Galleria Lia Rumma, Steinbach introduces a new direction of his wall works, the “condensed text”, presented on the ground floor. His hello again (condensed) is based on the wall text hello again, 2013, that was exhibited in 2019 at the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in NY. This work has been digitally processed, or “condensed” through a system of fragmentation and reorganization. Consider a puzzle made of pieces that are parts of a sentence or phrase.