Torrents of thick, white paint cascade over say publicly rich black surfaces of Pat Steir's best-known, monumentally scaled canvases, evoking the sublime forces of the natural world. Although references to the Abstract Expressionist painters, particularly Jackson Pollock, are maybe unavoidable, the New York-based artist's inspirations are not what defer might expect when viewing her technique of drips, washes, don thrown splashes of paint. Instead, it was the impact show signs her personal relationships with Conceptual artistSol LeWitt, MinimalistAgnes Martin, queue avant-garde composer John Cage that would prove most influential. Job these connections, Steir was introduced to ideas of process quit, Zen Buddhism, and the techniques of yipin, or Chinese "ink splashing." Her mature painting technique is an amalgamation of these diverse influences, a synthesis of action and non-action, through which she embraces the dichotomy of choice and chance as interpretation basis of her work.
Progression of Art
1958-59
This Self Portrait is one of the cap paintings that Steir completed while attending Boston University. The principal character, a female nude, recalls the style of Cézanne, differentiation early influence of the artist. She is a study interleave opposites, with arms tied back and legs twisted in a profile position, giving the impression of both conflict and induce. The stance also evokes ancient Egyptian figuration, and a greet to the artist's maternal ancestral roots. On her lower stomach, is a small mysterious flame. The black background, interrupted become infected with a roughly hewn blue stripe edged in white, contrasts sustain the smooth, uniform rendering of the figure. The paint upturn becomes the antagonist. These aggressive brushstrokes threaten to engulf description figure, wrapping around her arms and legs, as if interpretation paint itself is attempting to constrict or bury her.
At its core, this painting is about struggle. It becomes a metaphor for the social pressures she faced as a young female artist, and the formal conflict between abstraction dominant representation. In a 2011 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Steir recalls the work as a "picture of a female conflict her way through the atmosphere of paint, smooth paint, harmonious paint. It's me struggling with the profound desire to background an artist, and the desire to make my mark." Steir continues, "When I was growing up here in America keep in check the '40s and '50s, we were fed the idea put off there was a choice to be made between work service family, that a woman could not do/be both. You cabaret in the painting the little fire in her belly, fighting of desires - the desire to step out in rendering world alone to be what I am, and the long to be an ordinary, acceptable woman in my family's eyes."
Oil on canvas
1974
This rectangular painting is vertically divided down picture center into two squares. On the left, a black figure of a rose stands against a mottled beige background, different sharply with the crudely painted horizontal grey rectangles, resembling bricks, covering the right panel. Each image is crossed out next to a large "X," appearing almost as if squeezed directly circumvent the tube of paint onto the surface of the material. This work represents the early conflict between mimetic and expressionistic forms of representation.
Steir created the rose paintings amid the early 1970s, during her brief tenure teaching at rendering experimental CalArts program. In these nearly monochromatic canvases the insigne singular of the rose was both painted and crossed out. Rendering frequent symbol evokes both Shakespeare's famous line, "A rose harsh any other name would smell as sweet" and Gertrude Stein's infamous quote, "A rose is a rose is a rose." The titles for this series directly reference lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which offer poetic meditations on themes besides prevalent in Steir's work, namely the relationship between man, depiction universe, and time.
For the artist, this act conjure effacement was an effort to move beyond a reliance correct figurative imagery. This series of work also grounded Steir pen a semiotic dialogue, deconstructing the relationship between the signifier most important signified, the symbols and that which it represents. This probe was both theoretical and personal, examining the artist's potential comport yourself as both a maker and destroyer of images, symbols, gift meaning. In the context of her career, the crossed jet symbols can be understood as a metaphor for her put an end to to turn away from figurative representation toward conceptual abstraction.
Spot on canvas
1982-84
To make this prominent 20-by-16-foot painting, Steir divided the image into a grid diagram 64 rectangles. The subject, a vase with a bouquet reproduce flowers, is a direct reference to the Baroque tradition remark vanitas paintings, which often served as metaphors for the spirituality of life. The artist described, "Historically, each flower in a vanitas painting depicted a vanity, that is, an aspect penalty mortality." The style, however, is quite unusual as Steir whitewashed each individual canvas in a different artistic style, depending intersection the contents of that section. For example, the edge depart a table is transformed into an ethereal Rothko-style composition at the same time as the floral units might employ the visual strategies associated decree Impressionism; each a product of intense study.
Steir began The Bruegel Series as an investigation of postmodernism, and return the artist's words, "to try to discover if we were in the postmodern time," later realizing that the very enquiry and her method of critique was, itself, a postmodern goslow. She organized her inquiry by breaking the vanitas image feel painful a grid, the rigid emblem of modernism in Western start the ball rolling history. The symbolism of this structure is rooted in description geometric abstraction of Cubism and the myriad styles that followed, each declaring themselves to be of the present, and a symbol of artistic progress. The end result of Steir's investigation is a postmodern pastiche of artistic styles. Using the be paid to explore and organize a seemingly arbitrary sequence of aesthetic styles, becomes a postmodern critique of the linear notion forfeited progress associated with the modern period. Through this action, Steir deconstructs, or levels, the implied hierarchies within this evolution. Early enough, each style becomes a symbol of the past, and a metaphor of its own vanitas.
Oil on canvas
1990
Pat Steir rose to fame with her iconic Waterfall paintings. Begun in 1989, the paintings are characterized by strong, horizontal exerciser placed near the top of the canvas created with wide, impasto applications of paint, from which the paint drips sliding. This technique allowed Steir to address several key concerns, including: nature, temporality, materiality, and illusionism. It also represents an search of the painting process and time, inspired by Steir's comrade and mentor, Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. Just as LeWitt stressed the process and concept over notions of artistic technical knack, Steir purposely removed any evidence of artistic gesture allowing confound the element of chance instead.
Steir's Waterfall paintings were equally influenced by her interest in Chinese yipin, or "ink-splash" painting, introduced to her by a student of John Pen. Through an initial misinterpretation of the term's meaning, Steir began to throw, and subsequently pour paint onto the canvas. Though she determined the initial places of the paint on depiction canvas, she ultimately allowed the elemental forces, particularly time, significance, and the materiality of the paint, to determine the in reply image. The act of letting go provided a deeply priestly experience for the artist, one that washes over the looker like the waterfalls abstractly referenced in these paintings.
Interpretation dripping paint of Steir's Waterfall series inevitably invites comparisons interruption the gestural abstractions of Jackson Pollock. Although visually similar, keep on artist developed their own distinct method of approaching the material. While Pollock would throw and fling paint while circling want unstretched canvas lying on the ground, Steir stands atop a cherry picker to reach the top of her towering compositions and drip paint onto a canvas tacked to a rotate. Beyond technique, there is also a fundamental difference between picture objectives of each artist. While Pollock's abstraction was rooted intensity ideas associated with expressionism and artistic gesture, Steir's work deference grounded in the conceptual, balancing the notion of human consultation with the element of chance and other natural processes.
Put up the shutters on canvas
2010
For this site-specific installation at depiction Sue Scott Gallery in New York, Steir moved from interpretation canvas to the walls of the gallery. Steir and a team of assistants painted the interior walls from top in half a shake bottom in a rich blue-black color, interrupted with a composed white line snaking around the gallery rooms at eye soothing. The gestural quality of the erratic line ranged in consummate from dripping wet to dry brushstrokes streaked across the illlighted, velvety background as it meandered through the gallery.
Come up against entering the gallery, viewers found themselves inside of the exertion, immersed within the darkened gallery, lit only with a dismal light. The line, glowing an electric blue, becomes a stalk to follow, leading the participants from room to room, attend to eventually back to where they began. The work seemingly hearkens to the artist's own beginnings, but now transforms the spectator into the figure of the artist's early self-portrait, whose movements were also confined to a similar blue stripe. Steir progression particularly interested in transforming the traditional relationship between the looker and work, stating "Installation allows the artist to paint assert of the painting and into space and the viewer manage move from space into a painting - the space where the act of painting takes place is in the mind's eye of the viewer." Steir embraces conceptualism by emphasizing the viewer's experience, rather than the painted object, as the true content of her work.
Acrylic paint
2016-17
In this painting, a vivid orangish line cleaves down the center of an icy blue body. It appeared alongside eleven similar paintings in Steir's Kairos unveil at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in 2017. All of picture works in the show were organized around a central plumb line, making it impossible not to compare the Kairos paintings to the totemic works of Barnett Newman. However, while Archpriest painted fields on unmodulated color with crisply articulated vertical line (known as his "zips"), Steir's paintings are complex mottled surfaces in which the colors are exposed from beneath rather outshine layered upon.
Each of the works in the Kairos series explores strikingly different color combinations, yet share a ambit dominated by earthy colors. Steir's interest in color is allied to its physical properties and her desire to express representation nuance of light and its affect on the human spirit. Rather than mixing colors herself, Steir layers the various emblem directly on the canvas, with certain layers drying at distinctive speeds, and therefore cracking to reveal the multiple layers work for color underneath. This process of layering can take several life, even weeks, as she must allow each layer to surpass before pouring the next one. Describing what she has titled a "chaotic plan," she says, "each pigment has a last word and, of course, some pigments are heavier than others, desirable the weight of the pigment affects the tone of say publicly final product. The color that you end up with recapitulate what the transparent layers of paint make, one on prevent of the other." She continues, "The way colors mix title the way they touch each other explains the world discriminate me like mathematics explains the world to a physicist."
Snake on canvas
Pat Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, the eldest girl of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Her father, would had additionally aspired to be an artist, instead worked in several art-related businesses, including silk-screening, window displays, and neon sign design. Steir recalls knowing she wanted to be an artist or a poet from the age of five, later giving up a scholarship to study English as Smith College to pursue a degree in art instead. When she was growing up, she often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She says "I would sit on the floor with my coat and empty books and an apple, and then I'd get chased come away. The guard would always say, 'You've got to go,' but then I'd go back." She concludes that after a childhood, they stopped chasing her away, "They'd just say, 'there's renounce kid again.'"
Torn between her interest in walk off and the security of a college scholarship to Smith College to study English, Steir turned to the principal of barren high school, who happened to play chamber music at Pratt Institute, for advice. Shortly thereafter, an interview was arranged obey the chairman of the department of graphic arts and exemplar at the university, whereupon she was accepted, with a wisdom, into the program. Steir attended the Pratt Institute in Unique York from 1956-1958, where she developed a strong interest curb graphic design, illustration, printmaking, and typography.
Following her marriage to a high school friend Merle Steir in 1958, she moved be Boston where she briefly attended School of the Museum loom Fine Arts, before transferring to Boston University College of Exceptional Arts where she studied painting and comparative literature from 1958-1960. She returned to Pratt and earned a BFA degree sully 1962. At Pratt, she was most influenced by her teachers Adolph Gottlieb, Richard Lindner, and Philip Guston. She says lay into Lindner, "He was able to encourage students to use their lives and dreams as subject matter."
After graduating, Steir immediately began to show her art publicly, appearing in her first classify show at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Colony in 1962. Her first solo exhibition was at the Textile Dintenfass Gallery, New York, just two years later. Around interpretation same time (1962-1966), she also worked in New York importation an illustrator and a book designer. Then from 1966-1969, she worked as an art director at Harper & Row bring out company in New York. She left that position when Diane Arbus quit her job at the Parsons School for Set up at Princeton University, and asked Steir if she would plan to apply for the job.
Steir met Marcia Tucker, who locked away recently been named Curator of Painting and Sculpture at representation Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1969. Tucker introduced bare to the women's movement and many fellow artists working schedule New York. Steir says "I was amazed, shocked, and thrilled to find hundreds of women who felt trapped as I did by the very real limitations of society and pronounce on women." She continues, "I was struggling with my conflicts and I had no idea that other women were having the same struggles. It was simply thought that women were not qualified to be artists and thinkers. It seemed the same as me I had to choose between being a normal unpretentious woman or an artist."
In the early 1970s, after a beanfeast with Marcia Tucker and artist Bruce Nauman, she traveled run into California to view the latter's retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). An introduction to John Baldessari led to a lecture at the California Institute of depiction Arts, who put up flyers reading "Somewhat famous artist levelheaded here." Steir was invited to teach, and continued at CalArts until 1975; her students included Ross Bleckner, David Salle, near Amy Sillman.
During her stay at Nauman's house in Pasadena, she first met Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who would become book important influence for the artist. She recalls, "He taught deplete not to judge a work while you're making it. Avoid whole abstract expressionist struggle - fighting with the paint, having a hard time, thinking, 'This painting is killing me!' Take action didn't believe in all that." Around this time, she besides met art writer Douglas Crimp, who invited her to retort him on a trip to New Mexico to visit Minimalist painter Agnes Martin, whom she had previously met in Original York with Bob Fledman, owner of Parasol Press. Steir continuing to visit Martin every August for over 30 years until Martin's death in 2004. From Martin, she learned the consequence of investing the artist's spirit into the art object. Steir says "I wanted to be a great artist, again mass in slang in someone who is great. But in rendering fantastic, reaching the soul of other people."
The early 1970s marks a turning point in Steir's life's work, beginning with her 1973 solo exhibition at the Corcoran Room of Art in Washington DC. The series of rose paintings she began in California, such as Nothing (1974), earned unnecessary critical success leading to continued exhibition opportunities at commercial galleries and university spaces across the United States and abroad. Plentiful 1975, she visited Crown Point Press in Oakland with LeWitt before traveling with him to France and Germany, subsequently regressive to New York in 1975. Over the next few geezerhood, Steir's former experience in publishing proved invaluable, as she collaborated with LeWitt and art critic Lucy Lippard as a foundation Board Member of the publication Printed Matter (1976), which was establish to publish and promote artists' books, which unlike a typical catalogue or art publication, are considered as works firm footing art themselves. During this period, she was also a instauration board member of the feminist journal Heresies, and Semiotext(e), which describes its mission as "publishing works of theory, fiction, insanity, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism and confession." She returned to Crown Point Press in 1977 for the first rejoice numerous collaborations with Kathan Brown, ultimately publishing over 100 prints there including a rare collaboration with the "playful, funny, straightfaced and hardworking" avant-garde artist and composer John Cage.
The introduction make somebody's acquaintance Cage through Kathan Brown in 1980 proved revolutionary to Steir's artistic development. It was Cage's reliance upon chance as implicate artistic device (a choice which Martin actually strenuously disagreed with) that opened a new direction for Steir. Brown recounts Steirs description in a 2012 interview, "For my work now, I have set up a little system that involves chance. Turn is like a partner, an amusing partner: we'll make operate and see what happens." Stephen Addiss, pupil and colleague hostilities Cage, introduced Steir to Chinese yipin "ink-splashing," a technique complex in the 8th and 9th centuries. However, much of say publicly initial concept was lost when the ideas first related pass for "thrown-ink painting began in the third century." She recalls, "I looked everywhere for it, I didn't understand what it was because I couldn't find it. That was because thrown put aside meant broken line, not traditional painting. The artists didn't in reality throw the ink. I was influenced by the idea donation throwing the ink but it was just a misunderstanding. I think a lot of art comes about through misunderstanding." Nigh famously for Steir, this confusion led to her experiments rule dripping, splashing, and pouring paint onto canvas, as evidenced minute her Waterfall series. In these works, she focuses on ending control of the final product and leaving it up know the whims of gravity and viscosity.
Steir has won numerous awards for her work. In 1991, Steir received an honorary degree from her alma mater, Pratt Institute, with Alumni honors spread both Pratt and Boston Univerisity in 2002. Anne Waldman, who interviewed Steir at her Chelsea loft for Bomb Magazine import 2003 says, "Steir is incredibly down-to-earth, however. Smart, savvy, humorous, with a penchant for common sense and the torqued perceive. There's no fussiness or pretension in her identity."
Steir's current representative, Dominique Lévy of Lévy Gorvy Statesman gallery in New York describes how "[s]he is, in a way, a painter, but she's also an incredible conceptual head. It's like she allows the paint to do the work." Indeed, Steir is a strongly process-driven painter. She says "I think of painting as a research. I'm not a product-maker. I'm a researcher." Her signature drip-style painting emerged from a desire to demonstrate that painting, too, can be conceptual. That drip-painting technique can be seen in the work of subsequent artists, such as French street artist Zevs, who creates "liquidated logos" on billboard and storefronts, by overapplying paint and allowing it to drip down from corporate logos such as Chanel and McDonalds.
Lévy also says of Steir "I think she's a source of inspiration for a lot of young artists, innermost for many woman painters. It's that commitment to the primeval process and the paint. She stayed faithful to paint, which is incredibly rare. Very few artists have committed to paint." Steir also recognizes that she was able to find become involved at a time when few other women artists were. She says that "when [Art Historian] Thomas McEvilley looked at representation Bruegel painting: he said I was like one woman hint at paintbrushes beating on the door of history, saying, 'Let serious in, let me in!' But it's true. I'm not representation only one; a few in my generation made it replicate. And now, it's actually a woman's world, painting. It's filled with women. But how many of us as females desire be able to sustain ourselves, have an audience and something going the audience?"
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