Pat Steir 

“All of my work is a search and an experiment. I don’t consider anything finished, I think of it as all only a step along the way.”

Pat Steir

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).

Steir has presented her work in prestigious museums worldwide since 1963. Her traveling exhibitions include Pat Steir: The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style) (1984), organized by the Brooklyn Museum and mounted at the Dallas Museum of Art, and the 2010 retrospective Drawing Out of Line, which traveled from the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, to the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York. In 2019, she unveiled the commissions Pat Steir: Silent Secret Waterfalls at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and Pat Steir: Color Wheel at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. In 2021, the Long Museum, Shanghai, presented the first survey of the artist’s work in China. Steir’s work resides in such permanent collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Musée du Louvre, Paris; and Tate, London. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982). In 2020, she was the subject of a documentary by Veronica Gonzalez Peña.

Exhibitions

Selected Artworks

    • Pat Steir
    • Many Colors II (Blue), 2022
    • Oil on canvas
    • 108 × 72 inches (274.3 × 182.9 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • Red from White to Black, 2022
    • Oil on canvas
    • 108 × 108 inches (274.3 × 274.3 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • Considering Rothko #2, 2020–21
    • Oil on canvas
    • 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • Considering Rothko #3, 2020–21
    • Oil on canvas
    • 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • Considering Rothko #4, 2020–21
    • Oil on canvas
    • 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • Untitled, 2008
    • Oil, pencil, ink, and acrylic on paper
    • 20 × 15 inches (50.8 × 38.1 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • February Series II, 1991
    • Ink, watercolor, pencil, and tempera on paper
    • 52¾ × 28¼ inches (134 × 71.8 cm)
    • Pat Steir
    • Drawing, 1991
    • Pencil, oilstick, and gouache on paper
    • 67½ × 17 inches (171.5 × 43.2 cm)

Selected publications

Selected Press