Since the early 1980s, Haim Steinbach has challenged viewers to question the relationship between ordinary consumer items and those objects elevated to the status of art. In ultra red #1, we are presented with elements from both these supposedly distinct categories: enameled cast iron pots, digital alarm clocks, and lava lamps carefully arrayed like the stock of a home goods store atop custom plastic laminate shelves. The sculpture comes from a larger series of shelving systems Steinbach began in the New York of the 1980s, a time and place characterized by hedonistic consumer excess. With the series, the artist suggests a provocative equivalence between cycles of desiring and consuming everyday commodities and contemporary art. 

Steinbach often titles his sculptures featuring such readymade objects with similarly “readymade” text, borrowed from magazine headlines or fragments of ordinary conversation. The title of ultra red #1, for example, evokes the branding of commercial paint colors. Within the sculpture itself, however, we are presented with myriad shades of red, from the deep red of the pots to the clocks’ neon numbers and the cherry colored liquid suspended in the lava lamps. Here, Steinbach highlights color’s contextual malleability as well as our acculturated practice of linking objects of a similar hue, regardless of any meaningful practical connection.