Pat Steir returns to Rome after 20 years with an exhibition of new and recent works

The Gagosian Gallery in Rome is hosting the exhibition Pat Steir: Paintings from March 10 to May 7, 2022, where the public will be able to admire new and recent works by the American painter. This is the first that the artist has done with the gallery, and after a distance of about twenty years she thus returns to Rome. In 2003, in fact, the exhibition D’acqua e d’aria was held at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art.

With a career spanning more than fifty years, Pat Steir (Newark, 1940) was one of the few women in the New York art scene of the 1970s, initially combining iconic images with text to provoke questions about the nature of representation. In the mid-1980s, inspired by the art and philosophy of the Far East, she adopted a freer, more performative approach to painting. Harnessing the forces of nature, from gravity to chance, the painter pours, sprays and brushes diluted paint onto canvas, often doing so on a monumental scale. Inspired in part by the randomness used by John Cage as a compositional strategy in music, and influenced by Chinese ink painting and calligraphy and the thought of Zen Buddhism and Daoism, among other rich and varied artistic and literary sources, Steir has developed an intuitive and self-conscious response to the innovations of postwar abstraction. In his latest works, through forays into new chromatic territories, he continues to deepen his pictorial investigations with respect to the role of intention and improvisation, process and perception in pictorial structure.

The works presented in Rome expand the artist’s experiments with color beginning with the project Color Wheel (2019), a series of thirty large-scale paintings exploring the binary dynamics of color, commissioned and presented from fall 2019 to summer 2021 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. In addition to vibrant hues, the artist also continues to work in black and white. Painting on a black background, itself layered, One Afternoon (2021-22), Raindrop (2020) and Night (2021-22) present a wide range of examples. Steir continues and intensifies the latter approach in two polychromatic works that evoke seasonal light conditions-Winter Evening (2021-22) in shades of orange, lavender, blue, and red, and Winter Daylight (2021-22) with bright bands and multicolored layers.

Roman Rainbow (2021-22), a large-scale painting made especially for this exhibition, evokes the feelings of the city, accentuating warm tones with layered drippings of orange, yellow and blue on a glowing red background. In direct contrast, Small Rainbow (2021-22) presents saturated shades of purple, orange and green against the work’s blue background. In contrast, a series of paintings, such as Red Pour, Yellow P our, and Blue Pour (all 2021-22) is his bold response to Barnett Newman’s series, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966-70).

Image: Pat Steir, Roman Rainbow (2021-22; oil on canvas, 274.3 × 274.3 cm) © Pat Steir. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein

Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

Pat Steir returns to Rome after 20 years with an exhibition of new and recent works

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