Pat Steir
(1940 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Pat Steir |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Newark, New Jersey |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
1940 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
Printmaking
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Biography
Pat Steir painted figuratively while studying at the Pratt Institute, New York, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, making self-portraits and paintings of women. Influenced by Agnes Martin, she began to make abstract work, combining grids with landscape motifs, images, color charts and elements of typography, highlighting the different registers of representation. In some, such as in As I am forgotten (1974, Honolulu Academy of Arts), flowers appear, but these are often crossed out. Steir offered aesthetic pleasure only to refuse it. Around the edges of these works paint dripped down, drawing attention to their existence as a form of representation. The drip also had a special significance in the recent history of American art, referring to Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock.
Art history was to become the focus of Steir s work during the 1970s. She visited European museums, and made paintings in which the brushstroke, the ultimate sign or trace of artistic presence, was the focus, as in Van Gogh/Goya (1978, Sydney and Francis Lewis Foundation, Richmond, Virginia). These works could be witty: her Rembrandt's Hairline series centered on a single line, curly and straight, of paint/hair. In the multi-paneled series of the early 1980s, The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), a vase of flowers was painted in a plethora of artist's styles, from figuration to gestural abstraction.
Steir's trawl through art history then focused on images of the sea, as in Autumn.- The Wave after Courbet as though painted by Turner with the Chinese in mind (1985, Private Collection). From these works emerged her waterfall series, monumental canvases in which paint cascades down (initially in black and white, now in floods of vibrant color}. Steir now locates herself at the axis of three very different practices; traditional Chinese landscape painting, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art- Interviewed in the catalogue for her 1996 exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, she has said that the unusual direction her work has taken 'is the feminist aspect of my work. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I'll be suppressed, even if my path is not the usual one.' |
Samples of Work
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