PARIS.- LGDR opened an exhibition of new works by Pat Steir. On view now, at the gallery’s Paris space at 4 Passage Saint-Avoye through July 15, Pat Steir presents the most recent developments in the acclaimed abstract painter’s ongoing experimentation with gesture, color, and chromatic perception. Beginning her career in the mid 1960s, Steir was among the first wave of women abstract artists to gain prominence in New York as a vital figure of the avant-garde. Her philosophical and conceptual approach to painting was embraced in Paris and throughout France, culminating in solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (1990) and Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (1992).
Pat Steir follows recent groundbreaking installations of the artist’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2019–21), and Long Museum, Shanghai (2021). For Color Wheel at the Hirshhorn, Steir created an ambitious suite of thirty paintings that compose the full color spectrum, with each canvas comprising an immersive, monumental gradient. In 2021, Steir continued her in-depth explorations of color in the Long Museum show, her first major survey in China. The centerpiece of that exhibition was Rainbow Waterfall (2021), a painting that synthesizes the layered, kaleidoscopic innovations of the Hirshhorn series into a single large-scale work. Taken together, these projects reaffirmed and reimagined Steir’s ongoing and iconic Waterfall series, which have formed the basis of her meditative approach to painting since 1989.
For Steir, each advancement in her practice informs the next. Thus, her new paintings on view at LGDR Paris are guided by her most recent engagements with classical color theory. Central to these works is a rich and emotive red tone, denoted by Steir as a color of joy and passion. The scale of these new canvases, as well as the layering of Steir’s brushwork, invite the viewer’s gaze to move vertically in contrasting to the earthbound forces of gravity she employs in her signature process of pouring, splashing, and brushing thin layers of paint onto upright canvases. At the same time, the artist’s grounding in Minimalism is expressed through the delicate chalk lines that grid and demarcate the surfaces of her works. At the center of each of these canvases stands Steir’s allencompassing gesture: the brushstroke that engenders the “waterfall” of paint which asserts her intervention and presence.
For five decades, Pat Steir has expanded the possibilities of painting as a conceptual medium. Since 1989, she has created the works that comprise her iconic Waterfall series, pouring and splashing thinned oil paints onto upright canvases so that they cascade down the surface. She has described this process as a collaboration with gravity and chance, in which she uses “nature to paint a picture of itself.” Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, Steir studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1962. Among the first wave of women artists to gain prominence in New York and a vital figure of the avant-garde, Steir was a founding board member of the New York bookseller Printed Matter, a member of the Heresies Collective, which produced HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, and an editorial board member of the journal Semiotext(e)
