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Email PageDark and Light, Gravity and Levity
November 9, 2007- December 29, 2007
Reception: November 9, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Pat Steir
Cheim & Read
547 W 25th StA full color Catalog including an insightful essay by poet, Anne Waldman will be available at Cheim & Read Gallery
Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Pat Steir. The show is accompanied by a full color catalogue with an essay by the poet Anne Waldman.
Pat Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1940. She had her first solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, in 1964, only a few years after receiving her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1962. She has shown continually since that time, steadily creating a body of work informed by her interest in art history and influenced by 19th century Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism, Japanese woodcuts and, most importantly, Chinese landscape paintings of the Song and Tang dynasties. She is best-recognized for her loosely dripped and splashed “waterfall” paintings, which she began in the late eighties with Waterfall Painted with the Chinese in Mind. She continues to investigate and refine her painting techniques, and the new works exhibited at Cheim & Read reflect an ongoing exploration of her concerns.
In her catalogue essay for the exhibition, Anne Waldman cites proprioception—the unconscious perception of one’s self moving through space—as a defining term for Steir’s work. Steir’s painting is undoubtedly related to space and the physical body; the canvas’ large scale (most of the paintings in this exhibition measure 127 π x 109 π inches) provides ample surface for the evidence of her artistic gesture. But Steir’s relationship with the canvas also has an unconscious sensibility; the physical nature of her work is defined by unseen elements as well. Paint is pulled downwards by gravity and elongated by the passing of time, its direction and destination determined by serendipitous meanderings. Steir flings the paint through the air, pours it down the canvas, or starts it dripping with a paint-saturated brush. Paths of paint, merging and separating according to their natural journey over the canvas, result in beautiful variations of drips and washes, creating subtle stratums of overlapped color. The influence of Chinese painting traditions on Steir’s work is especially evident in her process: of note are the inky marks of the 8th and 9th century Yi-pin “ink-splashing” painters. The Yi-pin employed a technique in which free-form ink splatterings created evocative, abstract shapes, the paintings’ compositions reliant on an undirected impact and flow of splashed ink.
Steir’s interest in Asian art is further linked to an understanding of Taoism and Taoist philosophy’s concern for a connection between man, nature and the elemental world. Positioning nature and physical science as active participants in her work, Steir allows chance to take some responsibility in its outcome. As she noted to Waldman for the catalogue essay: “…all of these paintings are in some way nature paintings.” Though Steir has an acknowledged sense of how she intends for a painting to look, her work is ultimately dependent on the mysterious external forces of the physical world; she directs the paint through the decisive gesture and determined timing of its placement, but then she herself must wait to see the result. As she states: “The thing that I always have to force myself to do is let the paint hit the canvas, walk away and let it do its thing…If I watch, I’ll meddle in it.”
Paintings in the exhibition, all made in 2007, capture a radiating, almost spiritual, beauty. Steir’s work, tied to nature and the progression of time with, as she noted, “gravity and levity” as partners, provide the viewer with respite in their calm physicality. Compounded with the eastern philosophies and painting traditions that have influenced her, one is left with an understanding of transience, the fleeting nature of beauty, and the delicate fragility of the natural world. An awareness of our unconscious “moving through space” as tied to nature provides us with a precious desire to protect it.
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Pat Steir Paintings, available December 2007, Edizione Charta, Milano, Distributed by DAP
In a time denigrated by continuous war, environmental degradation and the sanctioned torture of human beings, social philosopher Theodor Adorno's historic question continually arises of whether there can be art and beauty after, or post-, Holocaust which is essentially the postmodern. Pat Steir answers in the affirmative, there must be. -Anne Waldman, Gravity and Levity, 2007
Cheim & Read Gallery (547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001) premieres Dark and Light, Gravity and Levity, an exhibition of 10 exquisite new paintings by Pat Steir. Steir explores the opposing forces of gravity and levity, making the paintings active collaborations with chance by the timing of the pour and the throw of the paint. To quote Waldman…" Thus perception of the body itself-as by movement of it's own tissues- gives data of depth. And it parallels a question that arises in philosophy and art, issues of 'making' and " intentionality" versus 'accepting'. It would seem that these possibilities two play into the dynamics of Steir's poetics." …"One senses in Steir's methods and practices a comparable desire to create visible tributes to the powers and rhythms of her own awareness and perception as well as a kind of obeisance, to nature—it's mystery and levity."
In a recent correspondence with Waldman, Steir wrote:
all paint is poured or thrown a long time thinking but painted in the moment not in a frenzy but slowly in the moment timing of the pour makes the shape of the mark stop start wait go
When you look at something beautiful and understand that it will die. Everything will die. When you know that, everything becomes very delicate and tenuous and precious.
Pat Steir Paintings will be released in December 2007. Published by Edizione Charta, Milan, this new book spans the artist's career from student work of 1956 to the present. While the artist is well known for her Waterfall paintings, a breadth of work is addressed in the book. Steir conceptualized the design and progression of all paintings featured. An essay by Art Historian, Doris von Drathen, including a conversation with the artist will be featured in the book along with over 200 color reproductions of Steir's paintings.
In 2006, Edizione Charta released Pat Steir: Installations, a book chronicling the artist's lesser known installation work. Steir has most recently shown at The Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland. Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Texas Gallery, Houston Texas. Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome Italy, Galleria Nazionale D'Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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