Haim Steinbach

Haim Steinbach (born Rehovot, Israel, 1944) is an American artist, who lives in New York City. Many of his works consist of arrangements of mass-produced objects or readymades.

Since the late 1970s Steinbach's art has been focused on the selection and arrangement of objects, above all everyday objects. In order to bring them to light, he has been conceiving structures and framing devices for their presentation. Steinbach presents objects, ranging from the natural to the ordinary, the artistic to the ethnographic, giving form to art works that underscore their identity and inherent meanings. Exploring the psychological, aesthetic, cultural and ritualistic aspects of objects as well as their context, Steinbach has redefined the status of the object in art.

He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA with his partner and son.

After his 1979 and 1980 solo shows at Artists Space and Fashion Moda in the New York, Steinbach's interest in the world of objects made him a significant figure in the creative discourse of Eighties' New York. He participated with Group Material, an artist-run collaborative which exhibited in stores, apartments, and subways, and also showed his work at the new galleries in the East Village, including Jay Gorney Modern Art and Nature Morte.

By the second half of the decade, Steinbach's work gained increasing attention in both America and Europe, and was included in various international shows: "New Sculpture", at the Renaissance Society of Chicago and "Prospect 86", at the Kunstverien in Frankfurt, in 1986; "El arte y su doble", at the Fundacion Caja de Pensiones, Madrid, "Les courtiers du desire", at the Pompidou Center, Paris, and the Group Material installation at Documenta 8, Kassel, in 1987; "Horn of Plenty", at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and "A Forest of Signs", at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1988. He also had numerous solo shows at important galleries, such as Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples; and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris.

By the late 1980s, Steinbach was recognized as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. One person shows were organized at the capc Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux in 1988, the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (with John Knight), in 1991, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, in 1992, and at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York (with Ettore Spalletti), in 1993.

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