Untitled XXV, 2019 (Taipei)

Oil on canvas
36 x 36 inches (91.4 x 91.4 cm)

Composed from October through December 2019, Pat Steir’s vibrant and expressive Taipei paintings represent the latest development of her celebrated Waterfall series. She initiated them immediately after the completion of two major suites of monumental, rigorous projects: Silent Secret Waterfalls for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and Color Wheel for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Steir applied to the Taipei paintings the experience she gained from the intense historical and scientific investigations required to create Color Wheel, while feeling liberated to approach each canvas in the new series as a discrete work.

Created in a more intimate scale than the large-scale works that comprise Color Wheel and Silent Secret Waterfalls, the Taipei paintings offered Steir an opportunity to reassess her practice, bringing to the suite a sense of exuberance and commitment to experimentation. With their brilliant hues and layered gestures, they demonstrate the continuity and innovation of her practice. When beginning this series, Steir returned for inspiration to her 1992 Roman series: her first foray into using a multicolor palette to paint her previously monochromatic Waterfalls.

In the Taipei paintings, Steir first applied a solution of diluted oil and varnish to a vertically oriented canvas. Over an underpainting of green, she coated her canvases with multiple layers in mixed colors, dipping a wide industrial brush in thinned oil paint and positioning it against the canvas, allowing the pigment to stream freely down her standing support. Once this ground is dry, she applied flowing paint in vibrant tones with a loaded brush, creating an interplay between directed gesture, chance, and the force of gravity. Varied in their compositions and exploratory in their execution, the Taipei paintings are united by the assurance of Steir’s technique and the joyous feeling of their layered color.

Emerging from a tradition of American and European modernism, Steir turned to East Asian art and philosophy to escape the strictures of her formal education. Synthesizing the two, she forged a powerful response to Abstract Expressionism, to John Cage’s strategies of composition by chance, and to her longstanding interest in Daoism. Steir approaches the creation of each painting as a physical and spiritual act, her process serving, paradoxically, as a means of surrendering control—an approach to artmaking that is deeply indebted to her sustained study of Eastern thought. Her signature pouring technique, simultaneously evoking a sensuous fullness and emptiness, elegantly suggests the movement of wind and water. Her emphasis on this expressive spontaneity is influenced in part by literati traditions of the Tang (618–907), Song (960–1279), and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. Indeed, these paintings are sites where myriad artistic practices and aesthetics that emerged across multiple centuries and continents converge into a body of work that cannot be wholly incorporated into any paradigm beyond those established by the artist herself. Extending her exploration of the relationship between intention and coincidence. Steir’s Taipei canvases speak to both Eastern and Western traditions while opening new possibilities for painting in the present day.