Elective Affinity Waterfall

Oil on canvas
111 × 147 inches (281.9 × 373.4 cm)

In Pat Steir’s Elective Affinity Waterfall, rivulets of blue and yellow paint cascade, flick and splatter across the vast expanse of the red canvas. Painted in 1992, just a year before the artist’s participation in the 45th Venice Biennale, this work is one of the largest of Steir’s extraordinary waterfall paintings from the late 1980s and 1990s that garnered her widespread critical acclaim. Titled Elective Affinity Waterfall in reference to J.W. Goethe’s eponymous novel and his theory of color more generally, it is among the first waterfall paintings that saw Steir embrace the primary colors of red, yellow and blue after limiting herself to a monochrome palette in the four years prior.

Elective Affinity Waterfall is not merely meant to be a painting of a waterfall, but be a waterfall. Waterfalls symbolize eternal beginnings and endings in Chinese art and here, too, come to stand as meditations on the flow of time. Transcending the intellectual and the pur-ported binary between representation and abstraction, this painting invites us to reconsider new ways of thinking, feeling and seeing.