"Sunset Emergency" is a two-person exhibition featuring selected works by Robert Feintuch and Saul Steinberg, opening on February 20th, 2025 at Totah Gallery.
Steinberg and Feintuch are linked by literary contrivance. Steinberg, occasionally stamping his drawings in a legalistic way while leaving them far from officious, shows figures and signs become virtual, shading off into the brink of illegibility. Feintuch, for his part, creates larger than life scenarios on honeycomb panels— fleshing out improbable vistas which are no less complex and communicative for eschewing any pretense to literalness. Generationally located at modernity and post-modernity, respectively, a shared sensitivity to the nuances of verbal and visual ambiguity fosters a certain detachment. Their techniques and methods comment on the limits of knowledge and objectivity, giving form to dormant impulses and desires. The world within a world quality of Steinberg’s artistry, archives of archives where the subject matter stands in for something two or three times removed from perceptual immediacy. In The Venice Table, 1979, the literal dovetails with the eerie and imponderable. The presence of bread and cucumber slices seem like keepsakes from a European travelogue. Meanwhile, the outlines of a dark seated woman, or a man gazing into an empty sky, suggests realms of the imagination which are far from interpersonal. This mock air of depersonalization is thickened by the crackling fog of Steinberg’s introspective personality – dramatized in the nervous rhythms of lines that recreate a ledger or speedometer. A painter’s painter, Feintuch’s works (a selection from 2005-2022) achieve in their content what Steinberg’s drawings illustrate in their form. Without encroaching on the territory of surrealism, a painting like Emergency (Sunset), 2022 gives a striking demonstration of Freud’s insight that jokes emulate the process of dreamwork. The layered quality of the painting derives from its composite, multi-tiered perspective. An arm, a wrist, a bucket—these take on a polyvalent importance. This is metaphysical art that pokes fun at its own formalism. Feintuch and Steinberg use trappings of artificiality against themselves, demonstrating how immersion in contemporary thought-forms and ideals can lead to interesting modes of subversion. Here, to be “interesting” carries more weight than anything that can be achieved through grotesquery or shock. Drawing viewers into existential questions, they obviate all arguments to the contrary, suggesting the supreme relevance of opinion when navigating the perennial flux of thought, feeling, and sensation.
Robert Feintuch (b. 1953, Jersey City) received an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from Cooper Union. His work has been shown internationally in twenty-two solo exhibitions at galleries including Thomas Brambilla Gallery, Bergamo, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Berlin, CRG Gallery, New York, Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York, and Studio La Citta, Verona, among others. He was also included in shows at the National Academy Museum, New York; the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice; The Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Drawing Center, New York; and the Venice Biennale (1993). Feintuch's works are held in the permanent collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Portland Museum of Art, and The Sonnabend Foundation (Mantua, Italy). Feintuch has been reviewed in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Forbes, The Huffington Post, The New York Observer, and The New York Times, among others. He has been the recipient of the Guggenheim, Rockefeller Foundation, Leube Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Feintuch lives and works in New York.
Saul Steinberg (Romania, 1914 – New York, 1999) exhibited internationally for six decades in galleries and museums, and posthumously after 1999. The one-artist exhibitions that have opened in the past twenty years include shows at the Morgan Library & Museum (traveled internationally); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Fundacióon Juan March, Madrid. He has been featured in over 65 group exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Galerie Beyeler, Basel. His work is held in over 145 public institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. A complete history can be found on the website of The Saul Steinberg Foundation.
February 8, 2025
