Pat Steir

Comet, Outer Space Dark Series Aquatint Etching Color Abstract Expressionist

1997

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with Conceptual art and Minimalism; however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured “Waterfall” paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.

Steir has had retrospectives and exhibitions all over the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, and shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art that traveled throughout Europe. She has won numerous awards for her work, and is thoroughly represented in major museum collections in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Tate Gallery. Steir is a founding board member of Printed Matter bookshop in New York City, and of the landmark feminist journal, Heresies, first published in 1977. She has also taught art at Parsons School of Design, Princeton University and Hunter College. She has lived and worked primarily in New York City as an adult. As of September, 2016, Steir is represented by Lévy Gorvy in New York and London.

Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey. She attended the Pratt Institute in New York (1956–1958), where she was influenced by her teachers Richard Lindner and Philip Guston, and Boston University College of Fine Arts (1958–1960). Steir returned to Pratt and earned a BFA degree in 1962.

In 1962, the year she graduated from art school, Steir was included in a group show at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1964, her work was in a show called “Drawings” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her first one-person exhibition was at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, in 1964. During that time, she worked in New York as an illustrator and a book designer (1962–1966). Between 1966–1969, Steir was an art director at Harper & Row publishing company, New York. Around 1970 she became friends with Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and other Conceptual artists, and she made the first of many trips to New Mexico to visit Agnes Martin.

Steir's first museum exhibition, in 1973 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., marked the beginning of a career dense with painting exhibitions. She has also made installation work (shown at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany, in 1992) and is an important printmaker. Crown Point Press began publishing her prints in 1977 and in 1983 the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, gave her a print and drawing exhibition. A retrospective of Steir’s prints at the Cabinet des Estampes in Geneva traveled to the Tate Gallery in London, England.

In the late 1980s, Steir became influenced by the artists John Cage and Agnes Martin and began producing dripped, splashed and poured works, embracing the element of chance. The artist relates this work to the 8th and 9th century Chinese Yipin "ink-splashing" painters, having studied ink splash in the harmony of nature and humanity, inspired by Tibetan philosophy. Wind and Water is an example of this phase of her work.

In 1989–92 Steir began limiting her colors to monochrome. In 1995, the monograph Pat Steir was published by the American art critic Thomas McEvilley, chronicling the artist's life work up to that point. In November 1999, Steir was the subject of an Art In America cover feature, "Watercourse Way," by critic G. Roger Denson, who wrote that Steir's lyrical waterfall paintings attest to her long-standing interest in Asian art and thought, particularly the ancient Chinese philosophy of Daoism, with Steir's literal and figurative motif embodying the flow of water (or in her case, paint) down a surface.

Steir has received many public honors for her work. She was the recipient of Individual Artist (1973) and Art in Public Institutions (1976) grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 1982.

Find original Pat Steir paintings, prints and other art on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Lions Gallery)