Pat Steir

Oil on canvas
107 3/4 x 115 1/2 inches (273.7 x 293.4 cm)
© Pat Steir

Long thought—study, research, training, practice—has led her to formulate painting’s rhetoric, with all its mistakes and felicities, and reaffirm its charisma. At a time when commenters on contemporary painting often sound like professional mourners, Steir suggests that the range of options open to it is great, and she does so simply by making anti-formalism beautiful, hard thinking glamorous, and painting itself a gallant existential act.

—Holland Cotter

Together with her careful study of traditional Chinese landscape paintings, Pat Steir’s affinity with Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions, such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism, has been a crucial factor in her conception of the act of painting as a form of meditation—a conscious sharpening of focus that leads to the union of the artist with the work of art. For Steir, repetition and practice are of primary importance when developing one’s skills as a painter—not as a means of honing one’s craft but as a way of becoming one with the act of creation.

Just as the Chinese landscape painters did not consider their images to be representational in the same way that Western artists did, in Steir’s celebrated Waterfall series, the marks made on the canvas by flinging and pouring the oil paint become as “natural” as the mountains, trees, rivers, and waterfalls depicted in these landscape paintings. While her striking gestures and compositional approach come to the fore, Steir, like the Minimalists, insists that her works are never finished; instead, they are passed into the viewer’s realm after she ceases painting. In this way, the subject of a Waterfall painting is the paint itself, for it literally manifests what it represents: it is both a picture of a waterfall and is a waterfall.

Red, Blue and Silver Waterfall (1989) invites the viewer into an immersive, non-representational but recognizably figurative and architectonic space, expressed through organically emerging and dissolving formswithin the non-hierarchic, centerless composition. As such, it is a site where myriad artistic philosophies that emerged across multiple centuries and continents converge and coalesce into a powerful example of a highly original body of work that defies all set paradigms except those proposed by Steir’s own approach to creation.

In 2019, Pat Steir unveiled two major museum exhibitions. Pat Steir: Silent Secret Waterfalls (January–November 2019) marked the second time in the history of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in which the institution commissioned an artist to execute a site-specific installation of paintings, the first time ever since Albert Barnes’s commission of Henri Matisse’s The Dance in 1932. Pat Steir: Color Wheel, a monumental installation of thirty paintings, which opened in October 2019 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, has become one of the most-visited exhibitions in the museum’s history and has been extended through July 2021.