PAT STEIR

Opening during Zurich Art Weekend, the exhibition precedes Steir’s solo presentation in July at Hauser & Wirth’s location on Wooster Street in New York, in which the artist reimagines one of her iconic wall drawings almost 50 years after its first installation.

Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Steir 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—attracted substantial critical acclaim. The new works in Zurich extend and expand upon Steir’s ongoing Waterfall series, wherein she intentionally cedes control and allows paint to create its own image via the artist’s signature technique of streaming and layering upon a background of gridded chalk lines. The resulting expressive quality of the paintings, which range in scale and vivid hues, underline Steir’s position as one of the most enduringly original contemporary painters whose conceptual practice transcends the divide between figuration and abstraction.

The exhibition anticipates the release of a new artist monograph from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, ‘Pat Steir: Paintings,’ charting the artist’s work from 2018 to the present. A newly commissioned text by award-winning writer Colm Tóibín further illuminates the artist’s work.