Haim Steinbach at Sonnabend

Hailed in the 1980s as one of the standard bearers for the practice of commodity critique, Haim Steinbach has since refined but not substantially changed his approach to art. He continues to arrange mass-produced objects on elegant Donald Judd-derived shelves. However, as with Peter Halley, whose geometric paintings were once read (with the artist's blessing) as critiques of a confining social order but now appear more convincingly as reworkings of modernist geometric abstraction, Steinbach's works have a different effect today. The formal complexities, the careful coordination of palette and the interplay and rhythmic repetition of the shapes of his assembled elements suggest a closer kinship with the transformative esthetic of an artist like Jessica Stockholder than with the postmodern polemics of the 1980s.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The works in this show were dominated by shades of matte gray and black, broken up by flashes of red, orange or yellow provided by the selected objects. The latter include such items as black leather medicine balls, yellow "caution" roadwork signs, orange plastic toolboxes and children's toys, among them a red Spiderman bust, green rubber Hulk hands and an orange plastic pumpkin lamp. Running as a leitmotif through all the works is a black rubber dog chew, whose snowmanlike form elicits a faint memory of Brancusi. Often elements are presented in pairs or even in triplicate, reinforcing their mass-produced nature. Most are unblemished and unused, as befits their status as purchased, rather than merely found, objects. They are placed on segmented laminated shelves of varying heights joined side by side, or, in some cases, interlocked, so that a smaller one seems to have slid into a larger one.

One might try to read arrangements like bricks and rats (2007) as rebuses. This work incorporates three clay bricks spattered with red paint and two costume hats sporting red fake fur and straddled by two plastic rats, possibly offering some kind of statement about urban nightmares. But in the end the sculptures are better seen as formal constructions. In tongkong rubbermaid (2007), for instance, the point seems to be the similarity between the shapes and colors in a pair of Tonka toy trucks featuring bright yellow bodies and large black wheels, and an equally yellow mop bucket that rests on small black wheels. The visual theme is carried on in the yellow of the shelves upon which these objects rest and the small black shelf and dog chew appended to one end like a coda.

Despite their pop-culture references, these sculptures have an elegant restraint that lifts them out of the realm of kitsch. Playing Minimalism off Pop, while revealing the visual abstraction of quotidian objects, Steinbach fully embraces the retinal approach to art that the Duchampian rhetoric surrounding his work once obscured.--Eleanor Heartney

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

COPYRIGHT 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group