Pat Steir
Large Blue Painting
‘The truth in painting, because there is no single truth in art, as in life, is all about perception. What one believes is what one sees. However, what does one actually see?’—Pat Steir [1]
With its tiers of cascading white and cool pigments emerging from a dazzling lapis field, ‘Large Blue Painting’ (2022) is a testament to the vitality and elegance of Pat Steir’s masterful hand. Demonstrating the artist’s commitment to material exploration and experimentation, ‘Large Blue Painting’ offers a throughline in Steir’s decades-long career while simultaneously declaring a breathtaking new height of expression in the artist’s revered oeuvre. Creating a larger-than-life presence, ‘Large Blue Painting’ draws us in, inviting us to contemplate its surface and depths.
Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Steir first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive pouring technique gave way to a series of critically acclaimed paintings known as her Waterfall works, in which a coalescence of forces—of rigorous method, gravity and gesture, achieves astonishing lyricism. Examples of this commanding body of work are found in numerous institutions, including the monumental installation ‘Color Wheel’ (2018-19) commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.
Engaging with art history, with influences spanning East Asian art and philosophy, the renaissance, and modernism, Steir’s paintings propose a meditation on perception, representation and the nature of painting itself. Although her works often allude to the natural world, Steir does not depict this subject in a traditional sense. Rather, she embodies its dynamic nature, treating the vertical canvas like a mountain, from which color is set in motion. It is precisely this shifting of proportion and flow that evokes the perception of a waterfall in this work.
Steir’s method is to apply a system of random occurrence, thoughtfully selecting colors and focusing on targeted areas of action. Leaning her canvas against the wall, she pours paint from above, coating the surface, then, with loaded brush, allows the medium to stream down from each deliberate stroke in drips and rivulets, emulating the properties of water. Within this system lies the visceral manifestation of the creative act, its fluidity and fixedness. Within this act, the artist finds beauty in limitations and views her painting as a collaborative counterpart. [2]
Influenced by Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, Steir’s subject is the ‘paintings that make themselves and the line between perceived reality and abstraction.’ [4] ‘Large Blue Painting’ continues this dialogue to mesmerizing effect. With its radiant ultramarine field, reminiscent of Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue, its quadratic surface conjuring both Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin, and its bisecting drips evoking the physicality of Barnett Newman’s zips, ‘Large Blue Painting’ extends this multifaceted lineage into an ingenious pictorial language, unfixed and unmatched.
About the artist
Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Pat Steir first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s storied five-decade career continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation.Portrait of Pat Steir © Pat Steir. Photo: Grace Roselli
All images © Pat Steir. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
1.) Pat Steir quoted in ‘Studio Conversations: Pat Steir and Doris von Drathen. What do I see—What can I see?’ in ‘Pat Steir. Paintings,’ Milan: Charta, 2007, p. 30.
2.) Pat Steir quoted in ‘Within the Interspace between Reality and Reality,’ in ‘Pat Steir. Paintings’, Milan: Charta, 2007, p. 15.
3.) Pat Steir quoted in ‘Studio Conversations: Pat Steir and Doris von Drathen. What do I see—What can I see?’ p. 32.