Pat Steir

(American, born 1940)

Pat Steir is an influential American painter. Best known for her Waterfall series of splashed, dripping pigment on canvas, her work is influenced by Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism, and Taoist philosophy. Steir’s eclectic practice is characterized by an interest in aesthetic degradation, wherein she frequently breaks down her large, washy paintings into semblances of itself. "I wanted to destroy images as symbols,” the artist has said. “To make the image a symbol for a symbol. I had to act it out, make the image, and cross it out. No imagery, but at the same time endless imagery. Every nuance of paint texture worked as an image.” Born in 1938 in Newark, NJ, she received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1962 and befriended and studied with many influential Conceptual and Minimalist artists of the day, including Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin, and Lawrence Weiner. Steir has gained widespread acclaim for her representational and abstract works, holding solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum in 1984, and being represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.