Image taken in Pat's Chelsea, New York studio by photographer Robert Lindholm
The Hirshhorn will host the largest painting installation to date by the acclaimed abstract painter Pat Steir. The exhibition is an expansive new suite of paintings by the artist, spanning the entire perimeter of the Museum’s second-floor inner-circle galleries, extending nearly four hundred linear feet. These immersive works will transform the Museum into a vibrant spectrum of color. The thirty large-scale paintings, when presented together as a group, will create an immense color wheel that shifts hues with each painting, with the pours on each canvas often appearing in the complementary hue of the monochrome background. Over the past four decades, Steir has produced a commanding body of abstract paintings that draw on the artist’s distinctive method of combining meticulous brushwork with multiple layers of drips and pours, simultaneously carefully calibrated and apparently random. Drawing on motifs from Chinese ink painting and gestural abstraction, Steir’s paintings are formed by brushing and pouring multiple layers of paint, allowing gravity to guide the cascading forms. Her signature technique echoes
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the metaphysical ideas of harmony with nature expressed in Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, even as it redefines the conventional fl at picture plane to sculpt deep, transcendent space. At the Hirshhorn, this commission will activate the entire gallery as visitors walk around the space, exploring the wheel’s spectrums. Moreover, Steir’s paintings will create a dialogue with the Gordon Bunshaft-designed outdoor fountain and seasonal changes visible through the Museum’s windows. Curated by Evelyn C. Hankins, Senior Curator.
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This painting is the third in the sequence of thirty
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Image taken in Pat's Chelsea, New York studio by photographer Robert Lindholm
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For this monumental painting project, Pat Steir drew inspiration from the Hirshhorn’s distinctive cylindrical architecture, which for her conjured one of the painter’s most essential tools: the color wheel. First conceived by Sir Isaac Newton in the mid-seventeenth century, the color wheel gives visual form to the color spectrum and constitutes the foundation of color theory. Since then, scientists, theorists, philosophers and artists have all created their own unique maps of the color spectrum, exercising a process that is equal parts science and art. Each of the thirty large-scale paintings on view here features a unique background hue who’s luminescent effect reflects the intermingling of the many layers of paint rivulets that stream down the canvas. Upon these seemingly monochromatic surfaces, Steir marks a broad central gesture, generally but not always in the background’s complementary color. Typical of Steir’s decades-long abstract painting practice, these words commingle meticulously placed brushwork with the variable of chance, as Steir brushes and pours multiple layers of paint onto the canvas,
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allowing the pigments to cascade freely downward. Her largely intuitive process is anchored in both a resolute conceptual framework and accumulated knowledge about the inherent material qualities of oil paint. Hung together and encircling the entire gallery space, Steir’s Paintings create two overlaping but opposing color wheels. Moreover, the works testify not only to the expressive possibilities that can develop from a finite set of variables, but also, and more radically, to the understanding of gestural painting as a conceptual practice.
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This painting is the twentieth in the sequence of thirty
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Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1940, Steir studied art and philosophy at Boston University and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1962. Over the past 50 years, she has exhibited extensively in America and Europe, with solo exhibition at institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Musee d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; and Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, among others. Her most recent solo exhibition is on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia through November 17, 2019. Select public collections include Louvre, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Denver Art Museum; the Brooklyn
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Museum, Brooklyn; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. In 2016, Steir was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2017 was presented with the U.S. Department of State’s National Medal of the Arts. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant in 1973 and an Honorary Degree of Fine Art from Pratt Institute in 1991.Steir is also a recipient of The Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.
Image of Pat painting in her Vermont studio by photographer Molly Davies
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This painting is the thirteenth in the sequence of thirty
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Pat Steir: Color Wheel is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and has been made possible with generous support from Agnes Gund, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Mihael, Mahy, and Christos Polymeropoulos. The Museum is also grateful for additional funding provided by Locks Gallery, the Hirshhorn International Council, and the Hirshhorn Collectors’ Council.
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Credits Article: https://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/pat-steir/ Photos: Page 2, 8, 11, https://garage. vice.com/en_us/article/pa7dz8/ pat-steir-is-reinventing-the-color-wheel Page 6, 13, 16, https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a29472293/ pat-steir-hirshhorn-museum-color-wheel/ Page 15, https://www.painters-table.com/blog/ pat-steir-painting-vermont