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

The large-scale Wish Waterfall (1991) invites the viewer into an immersive, non-representational but recognizably organic space, sustained through the parallel between its painterly marks and the image of a waterfall. Created by the repeated pouring of variously diluted paints, the present work demonstrates Pat Steir’s affinity with Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions, such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism—a crucial factor in her conception of the act of painting as a form of meditation. Repetition and practice are of primary importance as a means of becoming one with the act of creation, manifested with each movement and mark on the canvas.

PAT STEIR
Wish Waterfall
1991
Oil on canvas
132 x 132 inches (335.3 x 335.3 cm)
© Pat Steir