E6 SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010


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KLM


«NICE MOVE:


A classic Steinhilber work, from 2005. The giant geometric abstraction, in an elegant minimal mode, combines cardboard boxes and the hand trucks used to move the piece.


»PASS THE SAUCE: For a “painting” shown in Washington in 2003, Steinhilber covered a surface in packets of duck sauce. He says that his first exposure to art came in his home town of Oshkosh, Wisc., when his mother borrowed framed copies of Monet and van Gogh from the local library. Have traces of impressionist brushwork survived in his fast-food abstraction?


BREATHING ROOM: For a major piece at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the artist lined a gallery with plastic sheeting by using a giant fan to suck out the air between his plastic and its walls. When the fan’s action is rever


Is he the van Gogh of Home A


by Blake Gopnik


s the decade’s worth of pieces in our Dan Stein- hilber “retrospective” shows, the artist’s work is nothing if not varied. There are common threads. He’s often used commonplace materials


HELAYNE SEIDMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


‘CASTING ANGELS’: “It’s not that I’m interested in angels — I’m not sure I believe in them,” Steinhilber says. “But I guess if anybody asks me, I’ll say I believe. There’s something cool about believing in something you have no idea about.”


as artist’s supplies: those packing peanuts and dry-cleaner’s hangers, as well as trash bags (he made an inflated igloo from white ones) and dying fluorescent bulbs (for light works you could barely see). Crit- ics describe him as the van Gogh of Home Depot, and there’s certainly a sense that he seeks beauty in hardware. He’s also often worked with food and drink: a single giant gum stick, put togeth- er from many smaller ones assembled with saliva; also, hundreds of plastic pop bottles, filled with mixtures of soda and


set into racks so they build a sort of poin- tillist picture. (Those pop bottles, together with the hanger piece and the trash-bag igloo, were in Steinhilber’s breakthrough exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2002. He was the first local artist to nab one of its solo “Directions” shows.) These food pieces step beyond what his materi- als look like, to address the more bodily concerns that eating always raises. Even when food isn’t in a piece, the


body often is. In what may be his most prestigious commission to date, he’s made a huge piece that is currently on view at Mass MoCA, the gargantuan Massachu- setts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The artist lined a gallery with plastic sheeting by using a giant fan to suck out the air between his plastic and its walls. Every few minutes, the fan’s ac- tion is reversed and the plastic swells in- ward and encroaches on the visitors’ bod- ies. It gives a kind of lung’s-eye view of ex- istence.


But the crucial organ on view in all of Steinhilber’s work, whether body-based or not, is the brain — his brain, the brain of an artist who’s always looking for new problems to worry at, as well as new solu- tions to old problems. That’s what ties all his works together, however varied their materials or subjects. He is not just the van Gogh of Home Depot. He’s also the Degas of Dentyne and the Leonardo of Lungs. Which means he’s actually an art- ist who refuses to be any one of those things. His true subject may be his refusal of such definitions, and his quest to escape them — his career, taken as a whole, yields a mosaic of an artist’s mind at work. You could say he’s standing in for every artist out there.


The artist Steinhilber has become this summer in Queens seems unlike any of his other incarnations. We caught up with him one morning


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