Pat Steir: Snow and Waterfall
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
April 4 – May 12, 2023
Paris Waterfall, 1990
Oil on canvas, 98 x 88 1/4 inches
© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery
Forest in Snow, 2010
Oil on canvas, 127 1/4 x 109 1/4 inches
© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery
Locks Gallery presents Snow and Waterfall, an exhibition of works from Pat Steir’s acclaimed Waterfall series and related works. This marks the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery and is accompanied by a catalog featuring essays by Carter Ratcliff and Lynne Tillman. This exhibition spanning over four decades of Pat Steir's career.
Pat Steir is a leading figure in contemporary painting, known for her inventive process and lyrical use of scale and color. Pat Steir’s mature process was developed in the 1980s with her Waterfall paintings, by way of her associations with Conceptual Art, Minimalism and a close study of Eastern painting. Through rigorous and wide-ranging material experimentations, Pat Steir has continued to push the conceptual bounds of painting. In the mid-2000s, she created her ‘Split’ paintings, which are indebted to, but also slyly subvert the hard-edged, color field abstractions of her predecessors Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly. A selection of these works, which explore the characteristics of pigments and fluidity, and showcase her continued mastery of the chemistry of oil paints, will be on view on the second floor of the gallery.
For nearly half a century, Pat Steir has been exploring water landscapes both as literal material representations and through their poetic possibilities. This selection of works spans the beginning of her Waterfall series in the 1980s, to her present-day explorations of this motif. Immersive large-scale paintings like Graphical Waterfall (1990) are accompanied by more intimate works such as Lovely Red (2000) and Simone’s Snow (2001). The deep, receding space of Paris Waterfall (1990) is abruptly flattened by a syncopated, surface-level rhythm. Like the classical Chinese literati paintings that inspired the Waterfall series, these works are not simply reflections of physical landscapes, but an expression of the artist’s inner world and commitment to process.
Even though her body of work is grounded in the history of art, aesthetics and Eastern philosophies, Pat Steir’s studio practice is essentially focused on the pure pleasure of material. She pours, splashes, flings and throws paint onto vertically hung un-stretched canvases, embracing “non-intention” as a conceptual backbone for her work. Broad, veiled swathes of paint are applied and then left to drip, with gravity and the inherent fluidity of the medium taking over where Steir’s gestures end. The resulting landscapes carve out a contemplative space, appealing to the immediacy of the senses, as in the lush, spare Forest in Snow (2010) and the riotous air of Snowflake (1995).
The paradoxes between restraint and disorder, intention and chance, illusion and event, are a vital force in Pat Steir’s work. While her work has been a landmark in contemporary painting since the 1980s, this present collection takes on a fresh perspective. As water becomes an increasingly vulnerable resource, Steir’s continued exploration of these themes commands another collective resource under threat — our embodied, uninterrupted attention.
PAT STEIR was born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York. She studied at Boston University and received her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 1962. Steir is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976) and an honorary doctorate from Pratt Institute (1991). She is a founding board member of Printed Matter Inc. in New York City and the feminist journal Heresies. Her work is represented in major collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Gallery, London; Locks Gallery has represented the artist since 2006.
LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106
