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

Thomas Nozkowski @ Pace Gallery, New York - The Last Paintings

Thomas Nozkowski: The Last Paintings 

Pace Gallery, New York

September 10 – October 23, 2021

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI  

Untitled (9-69), 2019

Oil on linen on panel, 22" × 28" (55.9 cm × 71.1 cm) 

© Estate of Thomas Nozkowski, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery presents Thomas Nozkowski: The Last Paintings, an exhibition of the final paintings that Thomas Nozkowski completed before his passing in 2019. Marking the artist’s eighth show with the gallery since joining it in 2008, the exhibition features 15 works which Thomas Nozkowski rendered in oil on linen on panel between 2015 and 2019. Each painting showcases the enigmatic and uniquely variegated visual language for which Thomas Nozkowski was critically celebrated over his more than 40-year career. Seen together for the first time, they are also a culmination of the artist’s exploration of line, form, and color, and at the artist’s favored scale of 22 x 28 inches, the paintings invite close and sustained viewing. Richly hued and textured condensations that eschew any unifying style, they are deeply absorbing worlds unto themselves, and collectively celebrate the artist’s oeuvre.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Pace Publishing produces a catalogue celebrating the late artist. The publication features an essay by Marc Mayer alongside remembrances from members of Thomas Nozkowski’s artistic circle, including Peter Schjeldahl, Jennifer Gross, Karen Wilkin, Joseph Masheck, Catherine Murphy, Robert Storr, and Martin Puryear.

Over more than four decades, Thomas Nozkowski developed a singular approach to painting that rejected established aesthetic conventions. In the late 1970s, he abandoned the large-scale canvases popular amongst the Abstract Expressionists, with whom he studied at New York University and Cooper Union, in favor of small, 16 x 20 inch and later 22 x 28 inch canvas boards that were, in his words, “scaled for my friends’ apartments, that could hang in a three-room walkup tenement on 7th Street.” This modest size belied great ambition: each painting must work much harder in order to hold a viewer’s sustained attention. To that end, Thomas Nozkowski labored for hundreds of hours on each of his compositions, often scraping them down or rubbing them with a turpentine-soaked rag, so new images could float to their simultaneously dense and diaphanous surfaces. “If they get very dry,” he told one interviewer in 2015, “I’ll generally scrape them down and open them up again physically,” suggesting the surgical precision with which he reworked his paintings. Such effort is evidence of Thomas Nozkowski’s profound devotion to the painterly process, which he instilled in his students at Rutgers University, where he was a much-beloved professor in the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

In addition to his rejection of grand scale, he also refused the heroic individualism of his contemporaries, rarely hewing to a single style. Each of his paintings began with an image or images he observed from life—often on his daily walks near his home in New York’s Hudson Valley—and abstracted into forms that had never been seen before. Many of his works were inspired by images from art history, including Pisanello’s The Vision of St. Eustace (1438–42) and the Baths of Caracalla, though their references are never overt, leaving their meaning open to interpretation. As the critic John Yau observed, “By carefully loosening the conventions that undergird landscape painting, as well as using abstract shapes, Nozkowski arrives at a visual enigma that nevertheless feels rooted in nature and the everyday world.”

Using small brushes in order to force himself to slow down, Thomas Nozkowski found greater freedom in limitations. The Last Paintings showcase Thomas Nozkowki’s unparalleled range, with alternating registers of flatness and depth, biomorphism and rigid geometry, muted tones, and bright, vivid colors. His suppression of stylistic consistency was also refusal of the pressure for established artists to produce work characteristic of their personal brands, rather than pursuing new ideas wherever they might lead. Instead, Thomas Nozkowski was a lifelong learner as well as a teacher, always exploring his medium with patience and perspicacity. As he told the artist Garth Lewis in 2009, “a painter’s project, pursued diligently, will always start to inform itself. The work speaks back to you, takes positions, and presents ideas that point in new directions.” The Last Paintings are a distillation of that project, furthering Nozkowski’s radical aim to “free things from their history, from their strategies, from whatever constraints and imprisons painting.”

An online viewing room featuring a curated selection of archival works on paper by the artist runs concurrent to The Last Paintings on Pace’s website.

Jane Freilicher and Thomas Nozkowski: True Fictions, curated by Eric Brown, will open at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation on the Lower East Side in New York on November 5, 2021, and will remain on view through February 26, 2022.

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI (b. 1944, Teanek, New Jersey; d. 2019, Rhinebeck, New York) is recognized for his richly colored and intimately scaled abstract paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language. An awareness of perception and the desire to explore the possibilities of seeing, is at once grounded in reality for the artist and released from specific legibility. His concurrent practices of painting and drawing reflect on specific places and experiences—from the deeply symbolic to the notational—translating sensations and memories into abstract compositions. Thomas Nozkowski began exhibiting in group shows in 1973 and made his solo debut in 1979. By 1982, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, had acquired a painting from an early one-person exhibition for their permanent collection. To date, Thomas Nozkowski’s paintings have been featured in more than 300 museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including over 80 solo shows.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

Juan Uslé, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin - Open Rooms

Juan Uslé: Open Rooms

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

8 September 2004 - 3 January 2005

A major exhibition of the work of the internationally-acclaimed Spanish painter Juan Uslé opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Juan Uslé: Open Rooms, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Ireland, comprises some 33 abstract paintings dating from the early 1990s to his most recent works. Although influenced by ideas ranging from philosophy to multiculturalism, Juan Uslé’s work is not in any way representational, rather it seeks to convey his personal vision of the world, which is poetic rather than narrative.

The works in Open Rooms are grouped in five categories and all date from the period after 1987, when Uslé left Spain for New York. This move lead of a marked change in his work, away from the calming browns, blacks and blues of his native Cantabria to a more varied, contrasting palate, reflecting the fleeting sensory impressions and intense visual stimulation of a vibrant, ever-changing city.

The Sońé que Revelabas (meaning I dreamt you were revealed) series comprises large dark canvases - deep, pulsating spaces built up from luminous horizontal stripes, which seem to register the vital pulse of the artist, as it might appear on a cardiac monitoring machine. The Eolo (“el otro orden” or “another order”) works, by contrast, contain much lighter shades, often with large white spaces and simple playful forms in the style of Joan Miró as in Mosqueteros, o mira cómo me mira Miró desde la ventana que mira a su jardin, 1995 (Musketeers, or look at how Miró looks at me from the window that looks out onto his garden).

Rizomas includes some of Juan Uslé’s most complex compositions, with a layering of line and colour creating rhythmic, dynamic spaces which celebrate the sensory possibilities of painting. They also reveal the thought processes behind the works, while at the same time pointing to the complex history of painting. The In Urbania paintings are based on the horizontal and vertical structures of an urban landscape and also, the movement of light and form. Their tones of red, white and blue call to mind the flag, while their geometric structures, referencing freeway interchanges and subway lines, underline their urban inspiration.

The rich variety of Juan Uslé work is evident in Celibataires (singles). Although identical in size, this series can be seen almost as an exercise in the varied styles which are such a defining feature of his work. The Duchampian title emphasises further the individuality of each work.

Commenting on Juan Uslé’s work, the curator of the exhibition IMMA Director Enrique Juncosa said: “His work depicts the history of painting, with a complete awareness of its linguistic splendour . . . But it also expresses a vision of the world which moves and affects us, exploiting the power of metaphors and symbols which derives from the assimilation of new ideas and of a world which has changed externally, above all, with the extensive use of new technologies.”

Born in Santander in 1954, Juan Uslé began painting in the early 1980s. Since then his work has been presented internationally in many important museum and gallery exhibitions, including at the MACBA, Barcelona, the Saatchi Gallery, London, the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, and at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany.

Juan Uslé: Open Rooms was first shown at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS), Madrid. It has travelled to Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain, and Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst, (SMAK), Gent, Belgium. The exhibition is supported by the Directorate General for Cultural and Scientific Relations of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, along with the State Corporation for Cultural Action Abroad (SEACEX) and MNCARS. The opening event at IMMA is supported by the Instituto Cervantes, Dublin.

A fully-illustrated catalogue, with essays by Enrique Juncosa, Jan Hoet and David Carrier, writers, and Eva Wittocx, Co-Ordinator of Exhibitions, SMAK, accompanies the exhibition.

IMMA - IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

www.modernart.ie