With her specific concept-oriented approach Pat Steir can be seen in the tradition of abstract painting à la Jackson Pollock, a heritage which she combines with her expertise in Chinese painting traditions. At the same time, the artist’s close friendships to John Cage, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin encouraged Steir’s search for a system, which was both pictorial and conceptual.
Her famous Waterfalls, which the artist developed in the late 1980s, have been interpreted as an homage to Pollock reinventing the drip as a means for the paint to paint a picture of itself. Since around 2000 Steir has developed an ever more subtle method using the process of dripping to create a delicate interwoven curtain-like surface texture which has been the basis for many paintings of the years to come. Large-scale works like Dusk (2007) and The Dark (2007), which are on view in this exhibition, are examples for this technique. Steir explores in them the foundations of painting in which the elemental forces of nature – time, chance and gravity – play an active role as part of the creative process. Works like So Long Black, Silver and White (2009) and So Long Black, Red, Yellow and Blue (2009) on the other hand, take the same approach into her so-called Split Surface Paintings which are a reference to Barnett Newman and have been a prominent feature in Steir’s works of the last decade.
As one particular aspect of her oeuvre, Steir has been interested in wall painting, while during her long career of more than 50 years exploring different pictorial approaches. One of her wall works was presented by the artist as early as 1993 in the old premises of Galerie Thomas Schulte. In 2011, at the gallery’s present address in Berlin-Mitte, Steir developed the site-specific wall painting A Nearly Endless Line 3 for the nine meter high Corner Space. Steir now has returned to the space with her wall drawing Self Portrait, which she first realized at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1987 and subsequently presented, in modified form, in venues across the world. The wall, glazed with dark and at the same time very diluted acrylic paint, forms the basis for large drawings of ears and eyes executed in black wax pastel, which originate from anatomical sketches and pattern books of the Renaissance. Steir’s Self Portrait clearly eschews any conventional kind of self-regard, having instead to do with Buddhist notions of non-self. The artist describes the work “as if the walls of the room were the inside of the skin of a person, the space inside your head and body, rather than an inventory of surface appearances observed from the outside.” By having a team of artists and students do the actual drawing, the artist’s touch is deliberately depersonalized.
Pat Steir, born in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. Important solo exhibitions include the National Academy Museum, New York (2013), Museo Academia San Carlos in Mexico City (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art (2011), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2010), Reykjavik Art Museum (2007), Galleria Nationale Moderne Borghese (2003), and Madison Art Center (2001). Significant group exhibitions include the AC Institute, New York (2013), Castello Svevo, Bari (2013), Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (2012), Orlando Museum of Art (2007), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (2006), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2006), National Academy, New York (2006), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2004). Her work can be found in important international collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Tate Gallery, London, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. The artist lives and works in New York.
