Pat Steir follows recent groundbreaking installations of the artist’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2019–2021), and Long Museum, Shanghai (2021). For Color Wheel at the Hirshhorn, Steir created an ambitious suite of thirty paintings that compose the full colour spectrum, with each canvas comprising an immersive, monumental gradient. In 2021, Steir continued her in-depth explorations of colour in the Long Museum show, her first major survey in China. The centrepiece of that exhibition was Rainbow Waterfall (2021), a painting that synthesises the layered, kaleidoscopic innovations of the Hirshhorn series into a single large-scale work. Taken together, these projects reaffirmed and reimagined Steir’s ongoing and iconic Waterfall series, which have formed the basis of her meditative approach to painting since 1989.

For Steir, each advancement in her practice informs the next. Thus, her new paintings on view at LGDR Paris are guided by her most recent engagements with classical colour theory. Central to these works is a rich and emotive red tone, denoted by Steir as a colour of joy and passion. The scale of these new canvases, as well as the layering of Steir’s brushwork, invite the viewer’s gaze to move vertically in contrasting to the earthbound forces of gravity she employs in her signature process of pouring, splashing, and brushing thin layers of paint onto upright canvases. At the same time, the artist’s grounding in Minimalism is expressed through the delicate chalk lines that grid and demarcate the surfaces of her works. At the centre of each of these canvases stands Steir’s all encompassing gesture: the brushstroke that engenders the ‘waterfall’ of paint which asserts her intervention and presence.