Robert Feintuch and Saul Steinberg: Sunset Emergency, at TOTAH, New York, February 20 – April 19, 2025

TOTAH presents Sunset Emergency, a two-person exhibition featuring selected works by Robert Feintuch and Saul Steinberg, opening on February 20th, 2025. This is Feintuch’s first appearance with the gallery, and Steinberg’s second large-scale presentation.

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.