Haim Steinbach, an Israeli-born American, loves to challenge people’s way of thinking and give his audience food for thought.
His best known works are structures where he assembles and places objects he has found in the various places he goes to each day: homes, art galleries, museums, theatres and warehouses. Placed on the shelves, these objects become like the characters in a theater, establishing new relationships between themselves and the audience.
In this illy collection, it is the object itself—the cup—which becomes the stage for reflection on the relationship between letters and vision. The letters N O N and the number 8 are symbols of infinity, and the whole series is the representation of a glance which moves closer and further away from them, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small.

A fifth cup completes the series. Its chromatic relationship is reversed, with white symbols on a black background. In Steinbach's work the use of language and graphic symbols is meant as an act of memory, of preserving a relation of language and community. This special fifth cup that completes the illy collection is created in very limited edition in solid black porcelain. It is packaged in a special gift box with a book by Steinbach - published by Charta. The special gift pack with the fifth cup and the book will be on sale in New York during the premiere of the collection at the Armory Show and exclusively on this Internet site.