“Fragile” (online only)

Edition of 50
Glasses: 8 x 3 inches each  (20.3 x 7.6 cm each)
Glass shelf: 14 x 4 1/2 inches  (35.6 x 11.4 cm)
Signed and numbered on accompanying certificate
(Inventory #31957)

Louise Lawler’s “Who Says, Who Shows, Who Counts” includes three wine glasses that can be used to drink wine from or they can be set on the accompanying glass shelf.  The phrases, “Who Says”, “Who Shows”, and “Who Counts” can be seen as statements, but also, punctuation-less, questions. The words have been etched onto the glass, just as how history is written is etched on our collective psyche.

As Lawler so succinctly shows, understanding the relationship between statement and question is an important step in making change.  Hopefully, the work explores this by having viewers reflect upon, question, and re-imagine the rules of the art world, and by extension, the larger world. Taking glasses, normally used in elegant settings, to question, push back against and perhaps help move people’s actions and assumptions is as relevant an action today as it was in 1990 when she created the work.

Louise Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York, and lives and works in New York. One of the foremost members of the ‘Pictures Generation’, in 2017 she was the subject of a solo retrospective, “WHY PICTURES NOW”, at MoMA, New York. She has had additional one-person exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Dia:Beacon, New York; and Museum for Gugenwartskunst, Basel. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York; MUMOK, Vienna; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum, New York, which additionally featured the artist in its 1991, 2000, and 2008 biennials.

Edition of 90, 10 AP
3 x 3 inches  (7.6 x 7.6 cm)
Accompanied with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist
(Inventory #31848)

84 x 151 x 12 inches (213.4 x 383.5 x 30.5 cm)
(Inventory #31336)

Edition of 15
30 x 30 inches  (76.2 x 76.2 cm)
Signed and numbered
(Inventory #31686)

8 1/4 x 13 x 3 3/8 inches (21 x 33 x 8.6 cm)
Edition of 15
Signed, dated and numbered on reverse of mirrored shelf, all etched
(Inventory #29401)

Haim Steinbach is interested in the shared social rituals of collecting, arranging and presenting objects. For Steinbach, objects have a function similar to language.  People have feelings about objects, project emotions onto them and also communicate through these “things”. In his ‘display’ works, the artist uses the shelf as a device to highlight otherwise ordinary objects, allowing the viewer to consider aesthetic, cultural and social associations without prejudice or presumption. In “Untitled (Halco and Tour d’Argent salt and pepper shakers)”, Steinbach presents two pairs of functional salt and pepper shakers (one the inexpensive kind as made by Halco and the other, more “elegant”, manufactured by Tour d’Argent in silver). These two pairs are exhibited on a polished, mirrored stainless steel shelf. The shakers objects come from vastly different social and cultural contexts and are put together in a way that is analogous to the arrangement of words in a poem, or to the musical notes in a score.

Steinbach has said that his work is “about vernacular, which is a common form of language: things that we make, express and produce” and that it is “not only about selecting and arranging objects of my own choice, but also presenting the objects chosen by others”. He often refers to the structures he builds for the objects he presents as “framing devices”. Steinbach sets up comparisons within his work between ‘high’ versus ‘low’ culture, the unique versus the multiple, the personal versus the universal.