Pat Steir abstractions at the Gagosian Gallery
Pat Steir - Roman Rainbow - 2021–22
From 10 March to 7 May 2022, the Gagosian Gallery in Rome presents "Pat Steir: Paintings", an exhibition of the latest works by one of the great innovators of post-war abstract painting.
Image: Pat Steir, Roman Rainbow, 2021-22. Oil on canvas, 274.3 × 274.3 cm © Pat Steir. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1940, Pat Steir studied at Pratt Institute in New York and Boston University College of Fine Arts. Widely regarded as one of the great figures of American abstract painting, Pat Steir's work has been the subject of major exhibitions and retrospectives, including those at the Barnes Foundation and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, both in 2019. In a press release, the Gagosian Gallery explains:
With a storied career spanning more than five decades, Pat Steir is a trailblazing presence in contemporary painting. She was one of the few women who came to prominence in the New York art scene of the 1970s, initially pairing iconic images and texts to interrogate the nature of representation. However, in the mid-1980s, inspired by East Asian art and philosophy, she adopted a looser, more performative approach to painting. Harnessing the forces of gravity and gesture, she developed techniques of pouring, splashing, and brushing thinned paint onto canvas, often working at a monumental scale. Influenced in part by John Cage’s embrace of chance operations as a compositional strategy in music, and informed by Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, and Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, among other rich and diverse artistic and literary sources, Steir has evolved an intuitive and mindful rejoinder to the innovations of postwar abstraction. In her latest works, with their bold forays into new chromatic territories, she continues to further her painterly investigations with regard to the roles of intention and improvisation, process and perception in pictorial structure.
The works on view in Rome extend the systematic experimentation that Steir catalyzed in “Color Wheel” (2019), a suite of thirty large-scale paintings exploring binary color dynamics, commissioned by and presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC from the fall of 2019 to the summer of 2021. In addition to vibrant hues that generate unexpected nuance through layering and juxtaposition, Steir also continues to work in elemental white and black. Painting on a black ground that is itself poured in layers and then delineated by traced lines to receive its eventful opposite, “One Afternoon” (2021–22), “Raindrop” (2020), and “Night” (2021–22) present a dramatic range of outcomes. “One Afternoon” features a cascade that fills the full width and height of the canvas with light and motion; “Raindrop” is structured with tiers of paint falls, spaced in a rhythmic sequence; and the vast, dark expanse of “Night” is punctuated by a single linear interval from which descend ghostly rivulets. Steir continues and intensifies this last approach in two polychromatic works that evoke seasonal light conditions: “Winter Evening” (2021–22),with its electric harmonies of orange, lavender, blue, and red, and “Winter Daylight” (2021–22), with its streaming bands and layers of many colors.

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