Pat Steir @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'Before the Rain' Exhibition

Pat Steir: Before the Rain 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 3 – November 15, 2025

Pat Steir 

Winter Daylight, 2021-22 

Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Before the Rain, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Pat Steir. This marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the Locks Gallery.

A monumental figure in contemporary painting, Pat Steir developed her distinctive style of Waterfall paintings in the 1980s, embedding deep, lyrical meaning in the free expression of paint. Surrendering herself to chance and “non-intention”, Steir’s process of dripping, pouring, and throwing paint marked a defining moment in her exploration of materiality and of the artist’s role in creation, opening a way for her continued mastery of this dance between paint, gravity, gesture and ground.

Steir’s new works find her building upon and refining these guiding variables. Against a darkened ground, as seen in Many Colors II (Blue) (2022) and Winter Daylight (2021-22), dripping multi-colored brushstrokes act as prisms within the encompassing layers of poured paint while precise white lines recall her underlying interest in grids and matrices.

Pat Steir 

Monday Circus, 2022-23

Oil on canvas, 108 x 72 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

In tandem with the darkened palette and hypnotic allure of these paintings, Steir’s nomenclature also entwines itself with a certain poetics, inspiring viewers not just to look but to ruminate. The artist has said, “[T]he poetry of the title is part of the picture for me. It’s absolutely the same thing.” Take Monday Circus (2022-23), where swinging strokes of chartreuse, maroon, and orange conjure a myriad of evocations from playful to melancholic. In her succinct yet nuanced phrases, such as One Green One (2025), Pat Steir incorporates rhythm in the language of her titles that helps instill the image in the “mind’s eye.”  

Artist Pat Steir

Pat Steir (b. 1938) was born in Newark, New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York. 

Throughout her renowned career, she has been the focus of numerous solo museum exhibitions and site-specific installations. 

Pat Steir was the recipient of a Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship (1981), a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1973), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Pratt Institute (1991) and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University (2001). 

She is a founding board member of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York and the landmark 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

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Color Form Exhibition @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei, Hong Kong

Color Form

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei, Hong Kong

March 21 – May 31, 2024

Lucio Fontana 

Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1968 

Water-based paint on canvas 

24 × 19¹¹⁄₁₆ inches (61 × 50 cm)

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei

Pierre Soulages 

Peinture 101 x 130 cm, 16 août 2015 

Acrylic on canvas 

39¾ × 51³⁄₁₆ inches (101 × 130 cm)

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei presents Color Form, an exhibition that delves into the two fundamental building blocks of painting—color and form—the two properties that lie at the heart of the medium’s potential. For modern physicists, color is seen as the eye’s perception of light waves of different frequencies—while form relates to the shape of matter. In science, as in art, the precise nature of this intrinsic relationship between light, energy, and matter is veiled. For artists, the creative relationship between form and color is one that has been explored intuitively ever since the first cave paintings made over 40,000 years ago. 

It is no accident that during the modern Atomic Age of the 1950s and ’60s—when the elemental nature of the relationship between light, energy, and matter had been made evident to all mankind— many painters began to focus uniquely on form and color in their work: elevating these two central components as the sole protagonists of their art. In America, this marked the period of color-field painting, with artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman creating large-scale canvases filled with blocks of emotive, abstract color. In Europe, another type of color-form painting also became a mainstay of various avant-garde artists from Pierre Soulages and Alberto Burri, to Lucio Fontana and Zao Wou-Ki. 

 

From the 1950s onward, each of these artists used their own modes of color-form abstraction to explore the intrinsic relationship between light, energy, space, and matter. For Pierre Soulages, as his Outrenoir (“beyond-black”) paintings reveal, the concentration on black pigment allowed for the discovery of illumination and light. “My instrument is not black,” Soulages insisted “but the light reflected from the black.” His works including Peinture 101 x 130 cm, 16 août 2015 and Peinture 309 x 181 cm, 12 décembre 2013, exemplify his ethos: “I found that the light reflected by the black surface elicits certain emotions in me. These aren’t monochromes. The fact that light can come from the color which is supposedly the absence of light is already quite moving, and it is interesting to see how this happens.” By applying paint in dense, material layers and using varied tools as well as brushes to generate smooth and rough surfaces, Soulages created surface textures that absorbed or emitted light. “Rather than movement, I prefer to talk of tension,” Pierre Soulages said, “and rhythm, yes. We can also say form: a shaping of matter and light.”

While Pierre Soulages made use of monochromatic fields of black to portray light, Italian artists such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana took monochrome painting in other directions. For Alberto Burri, planes of single hues, as seen in Nero Cellotex (1986–87) became a means of exploring the innate nature and self expressive potentials of painted matter—while for Fontana, monochromatic tone was a vehicle for the articulation of deeper understandings of cosmic space.

In his investigations of space, including his Attese works, and Concetto spaziale, Attese (1968) in particular, Lucio Fontana destroyed the material surface of the canvas with a slash of a knife, opening up the saturated red picture plane to the embracing voids of space. In so doing, he created a painting that unites form, color, material, and space through his decisive gestures. A similar use of spontaneous energy to form painterly matter underpins the pictorial abstraction of Chinese artists like Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun, who, working in Paris from the 1950s onwards, sought to meld traditional Chinese painting with the color-form explorations of Western abstraction.

By contrast, Pat Steir’s Waterfall series reflects the attempts of an American-born artist to draw inspiration from Eastern approaches to color and form. Deeply influenced by Chinese literati paintings, Zen Buddhism, and the example of John Cage, Pat Steir’s work, exemplified by Another Place (2017), investigates the aesthetic potentials of chance, gravity, and the weight of pigment to generate a painting’s ultimate form. Pat Steir has said, “The way colors mix and the way they touch each other explains the world to me like mathematics explains the world to a physicist.”

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN & WEI

G/F, 2 Ice House Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.levygorvydayan.com

Pat Steir: Snow and Waterfall @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Pat Steir: Snow and Waterfall 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia 

April 4 – May 12, 2023 

PAT STEIR 

Paris Waterfall, 1990

Oil on canvas, 98 x 88 1/4 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

PAT STEIR 

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

www.locksgallery.com

Pat Steir @ Hauser & Wirth, NYC - Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls

Pat Steir

Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls

Hauser & Wirth, New York

10 November – 23 December 2022

Pat Steir

Blue River, 2005

Oil on canvas

342.9 x 1129.7 x 6.4 cm / 135 x 444 3/4 x 2 1/2 in

© Pat Steir. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Pat Steir

Rainbow Waterfall #4, 2022

Oil on canvas

274.3 x 274.3 cm / 108 x 108 inches

© Pat Steir. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

Pat Steir’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, and her first solo show in New York City since 2017, ‘Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls’ is comprised of vibrant new paintings, including the artist’s largest and most daring single canvas to date and a brand-new body of large-scale works, which are a continuation of her iconic ‘Waterfall’ series first begun in 1988. Bringing abstraction and conceptualism together into a uniquely lyrical coexistence, Pat Steir has spent more than five decades generating her visually arresting and intellectually rigorous oeuvre, expanding our understanding of the value of both control and chaos within art.

At 37 feet wide and 11 feet high, Pat Steir’s breathtaking ‘Blue River’ is the first work visitors encounter in the gallery. The largest single painting on canvas the artist has ever created, it is comprised of an enormous and seemingly boundless veil of blue bordered by sheets of oscillating red and silver. This work evokes not only the fluidity of water and paint, but also the vastness of the universe and its unfathomable power. An immense, durational work, 'Blue River' seems to point toward the river of time. It envelops the viewer, inviting reflection and meditation, and creating space for thoughts and feelings to ebb and flow like the unpredictable currents.

Pat Steir has said, ‘I paint water often, but don’t depict it; it is the paint itself that flows.’ This phenomenon is especially evident in Steir’s new series of ‘Rainbow Waterfalls,’ a radiantly colorful extension of the artist’s earlier black and white ‘Waterfall’ paintings. That acclaimed body of work was developed through the artist’s innovative technique of pouring, flinging and throwing paint onto canvas, embracing the inherent fluidity of the medium and utilizing gravity and chance to determine outcomes. In the latest incarnation of the series, Pat Steir has replaced black and white with an investigation into primary colors––red, yellow and blue––producing a prismatic effect in pursuit of determining equal value and space for each pigment.

To create the ‘Rainbow Waterfalls,’ Pat Steir first mapped out the compositions with chalk lines, establishing grids to guide where paint will land. While these faint white lines will blow away over time, some remain faintly visible in the final works––a remnant of one of the few elements of order Steir maintains over the works. Her canvases are primed in green, enabling the background to impart a distinct glow from behind. Afterward, Steir’s chosen pigments take the lead––cascading down the surface with the full story of their journey only revealed in the edges of the canvas. Patient observation rewards the viewer: the more time is spent looking at the paintings, the more dramatic their differences and details appear.

Pat Steir

Rainbow Waterfall #5, 2022

Oil on canvas

274.3 x 274.3 cm / 108 x 108 inches

© Pat Steir. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

PAT STEIR

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, Pat Steir is among the great innovators of contemporary painting. She first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Pat Steir’s storied five-decade career continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation. As much as Pat Steir’s process embraces chance, she retains complete command over the basic parameters. It is a harmonious collaboration between control and chaos, ‘chance within limitations.’ A remarkable synthesis of conceptualism, minimalism, and abstraction that challenges the postwar American canon, Pat Steir’s practice remains limitless.

HAUSER & WIRTH NEW YORK

542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.hauserwirth.com

Pat Steir Paintings, Cheim & Read, NYC

PAT STEIR

GOLD OVER GREEN, 

RED OVER GOLD,

ORANGE OVER ORANGE

2009-10 Oil on canvas

84 x 84 in 213,4 x 213,4 cm

Image courtesy of Cheim & Read

Pat Steir: Winter Paintings Cheim & Read, New York
February 17 - March 26, 2011

An exhibition of recent paintings by PAT STEIR will be on view at Cheim & Read gallery in New York. The show is accompanied by a full color catalogue with essays by Kay Larson and Matthew Israel. Steir’s last show with Cheim & Read was in 2007.

PAT STEIR BIOGRAPHY

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1940, Pat Steir received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1962. Her work has been shown almost continually since graduation. After debuting in a few group shows, including Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, she had her first solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in 1964. 

Though with her early work Steir was loosely allied with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, she is best-recognized for dripped, splashed and poured “waterfall” paintings which she first started in the late 1980s. As Larson explores in her catalogue essay for the show, Steir’s continuous search for the essence of painting guided her to John Cage, who she met in 1980, and Agnes Martin, who she visited in New Mexico every year for 30 years, until Martin’s death in 2004. These two artists provided Steir with enviable mentorship. From Cage, Steir learned the importance of “non-doing,” the role of chance, and the separation of ego. Martin showed her the “magic” of work in which the artist “invest[ed] their spirit into an object.” Both lessons found direction in Steir’s poured-paint paintings: paint, once applied, flows downwards, its serendipitous path routed by its own unpredictable journey. Steir, intentionally removing herself from the action allowing gravity, time and the environment to determine the work’s result. She positions nature and its elemental forces as active participants. In this vein, Steir is also profoundly influenced by Chinese painting traditions and techniques, especially the inky marks of the 8th and 9th century Yi-pin “ink-splashing” painters, and Taoist philosophy’s aspiration for harmonious, unfettered connections between man, nature and the cosmos.

PAT STEIR: WINTER PAINTINGS

Pat Steir’s newest paintings are a continued exploration of this technique. Her canvases are constructed and divided simply and prepared with a dry ground. She determines and mixes the colors – thinning paint with oil – and from there begins a meditative process of pouring, dripping or splashing, patiently waiting as each paint layer reveals itself. The majority of the new works present canvases halved by painted panels of saturated, jewel-like color – glowing lapis lazuli blues, radiating golds, reds, ochres, and deep purple-blacks. The paintings’ two halves interact at the center line, sometimes merging, sometimes exposing their divide. Ephemeral, overlapping fields of paint quietly share in the mystery of their making – Steir’s process of painting begins with a controlled act (a chosen color, a decisive gesture), the result is a collaboration with gravity. The “non-intention” of Cage and introspective spirituality of Martin is evident. As Pat Steir says, “I can’t do it again. I can’t replicate it even if I know what happened. That’s the pleasure of it.”

CHEIM & READ 
547 W 25 NYC USA
www.cheimread.com