Curated by Tom Eccles and Johanna Burton

Conspicuous in his absence from the generation-defining 1986 exhibition that catapulted Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, and Meyer Vaisman (forever after known as the Sonnabend Four) into the blue-chip empyrean, fifth wheel Haim Steinbach went from white-hot to “underrecognized” in the hiccup of a SoHo season. Twenty-seven years on, this bolt-from-the-blue survey, tracking the artist’s career from his grid-based paintings of the 1970s to today’s large-scale installations, means to lay that epithet to rest. Surely the artist’s signature Formica shelves displaying tidy rows of period-perfect product rank among the indelible tokens of their time. I, for one, cannot think of another artist whose output I would be greedier to assess with fresh eyes.

Travels to Kunsthalle Zürich, spring 2014.

— Jack Bankowsky