Project details
Category
ARTPLACES
beep honk toot
Milan – untill 30 January 2025
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.
On the first floor, in beep honk toot (condensed/spectrum) Steinbach expands the condensation process to include color. Starting from the wall text beep honk toot displayed in the Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1989, the output of the condensation process is restricted to three-by-three tile grid squares. A random number generator produces a series of spectrum gradient and solid color tiles. These tiles are sometimes selected at random to be reoriented or even deleted. The results are then transferred to canvas, borrowing painting’s status as the prototypical platform for thinking color. Painting as convention, painting as shelf even.
