Haim Steinbach (b. 1944)

Objects – ordinary things – are Steinbach’s offerings. The offsprung object, newborn, shining and glowing in the light of a rhetoric of elegance and hope, initially receives the unadulterated, exaggerated attention of the many in whose psychological and financial
interests it is affectionately named. And, despite the accretion upon accretion of language and image events which attempt to suffocate and extinguish its viscerality and materiality in the name of a spectral and spectacular civilization, somehow the object obdurately objects to any premature death as an image and lives on as a phenomenal material experience. It endures, sometimes exuberantly. Steinbach’s objects, juxtaposed and highlighted, remind us of this perpetuity and this hope (B. Ferguson, Haim Steinbach: North East South West, 2000).