PaceWildenstein, in conjunction with The Saul Steinberg Foundation, is pleased to present Saul Steinberg: Tables and Other Sculpture, the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Steinberg’s wood assemblages from the 1970s and 1980s, at 32 East 57th Street, New York City, from January 11 through February 9, 2008. Saul Steinberg: Tables and Other Sculpture features the artist’s rarely exhibited mixed-media “Table” constructions as well as wall reliefs.  This is the eighth exhibition devoted to the artist’s work at PaceWildenstein. 

By the early 1960s, Steinberg had decided to pare down his wide-ranging endeavors—book and magazine features, stage sets, fabric designs, and holiday cards, among others—and concentrate on his work for The New Yorker and on art for gallery and museum exhibitions.  Within a decade, he had begun sculpting or, by his own account, “whittling,” facsimiles of the ordinary objects in his studio—pen and pencils, paint brushes, sketchbooks, a pocket calendar, even his own painter’s palette—at a 1:1 scale. Many of these trompe-l’oeil objects were then incorporated into his first “drawing tables”—three-dimensional renderings of the draftsman’s life in art, filled with his drawing tools, sketchbooks, and replications of works completed or in progress.  The sculptural assemblages range from Bonbon Fazul (Table Series) (1971) and The Pyramid Table (1974) to later examples, including interiors such as the Art Deco bedroom at Hotel Metropole (1987) and U.S. Post Office (1984), Steinberg’s wry take on public architecture.  The massive, oppressively official structure in the latter rises up from a drawing Steinberg made in 1977 entitled Federal Bldg., Cincinnati, Ohio.  In 1981, another drawing renamed the same structure US Post Office, Cincinnati.