May 2, 2024
Pat Steir
Painted Rain
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood
February 28 - May 4, 2024
Pat Steir
The point of departure for Pat Steir's exhibition Painted Rain at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and the color of the sky and sea, in contrast to the muted tones of New York. This aura permeates her current paintings and coincidently, the pieces (as they are filled with drips) also evoke the recent weather — the violent storms and torrential rains that have pounded the region this season.
Steir has been painting since the 1970s and throughout her five-decade career she has been celebrated for her large scale abstractions presented both as canvases and as site-specific wall drawings. Her works are often created by pouring and dripping buckets of paint from the top of a tall ladder. This allows gravity to dictate the flow of the colors. She began making drip paintings that resembled waterfalls in the 1980s— powerful and evocative pieces that relied both on chance (as drips and pours cannot be completely controlled) as well as Steir's innate sense of color. To create the paintings on view, she begins by covering the canvas with a solid color ground that still emits a glow through the work, although just the base layer. She next applies a grid of chalk lines that become a geometric framework or structure that contrasts the more fluid chaotic forms of the drips which are poured on top.
The background in All the Colors (all works 2022-23) is reminiscent of a twilight sky just before night that still retains an azure essence. The painting is divided in quarters by two white chalk lines that meet in the center of the canvas. Placed just above this intersection are six horizontal brush strokes that occupy the center and take command of the work. Orange, deep red, green, yellow red and light blue stand as elements of color in an otherwise barren ground. In Thin Air, she covers a cobalt background with textured layers that are a lighter tone of blue. Wide horizontal bands of red, white and yellow are painted just above the center and allowed to drip and meld together as they cascade down the length of the canvas toward the floor.
While the majority of the paintings explore the relationship between striations of color against a range of blue backgrounds, in Green on Top Steir covers a dark rust ground with overlapping stripes that drip down to become veins of intermingling green, orange and dark red. In Some Blues, the white chalk lines divide a deep red background into a grid of rectangles. Toward the center of the work, Steir paints thirteen separate horizontal lines that transition from light to dark blue to create the illusion of a gradient. In this piece, the lines do not drip or fuse together. Steir explores the tensions between texture and color here, as well as playful foreground and background relationships.
Steir's new works are a celebration of color— specifically the color blue. It is somewhat ironic to learn that eight years ago she was diagnosed with color blindness and learned she cannot see that hue. That being said, Steir still mixes her paints to maximize the subtle differences in this color and through an exploration of both gesture and chance has created a powerful and emotionally complex body of work. Her pieces are simultaneously a formal examination of the properties of color and paint, as well as an experiment in controlled chaos. These large scale paintings take their inspiration not only from color but also from nature (the flow of rivers or rain) and the fluids that run through the human body.
Painted Rain
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood
February 28 - May 4, 2024
Pat Steir
The point of departure for Pat Steir's exhibition Painted Rain at Hauser & Wirth is an exploration of blue, a color omnipresent in Los Angeles. When first visiting the city over fifty years ago to teach at CalArts, Steir was struck by the quality of light and the color of the sky and sea, in contrast to the muted tones of New York. This aura permeates her current paintings and coincidently, the pieces (as they are filled with drips) also evoke the recent weather — the violent storms and torrential rains that have pounded the region this season.
Steir has been painting since the 1970s and throughout her five-decade career she has been celebrated for her large scale abstractions presented both as canvases and as site-specific wall drawings. Her works are often created by pouring and dripping buckets of paint from the top of a tall ladder. This allows gravity to dictate the flow of the colors. She began making drip paintings that resembled waterfalls in the 1980s— powerful and evocative pieces that relied both on chance (as drips and pours cannot be completely controlled) as well as Steir's innate sense of color. To create the paintings on view, she begins by covering the canvas with a solid color ground that still emits a glow through the work, although just the base layer. She next applies a grid of chalk lines that become a geometric framework or structure that contrasts the more fluid chaotic forms of the drips which are poured on top.
The background in All the Colors (all works 2022-23) is reminiscent of a twilight sky just before night that still retains an azure essence. The painting is divided in quarters by two white chalk lines that meet in the center of the canvas. Placed just above this intersection are six horizontal brush strokes that occupy the center and take command of the work. Orange, deep red, green, yellow red and light blue stand as elements of color in an otherwise barren ground. In Thin Air, she covers a cobalt background with textured layers that are a lighter tone of blue. Wide horizontal bands of red, white and yellow are painted just above the center and allowed to drip and meld together as they cascade down the length of the canvas toward the floor.
While the majority of the paintings explore the relationship between striations of color against a range of blue backgrounds, in Green on Top Steir covers a dark rust ground with overlapping stripes that drip down to become veins of intermingling green, orange and dark red. In Some Blues, the white chalk lines divide a deep red background into a grid of rectangles. Toward the center of the work, Steir paints thirteen separate horizontal lines that transition from light to dark blue to create the illusion of a gradient. In this piece, the lines do not drip or fuse together. Steir explores the tensions between texture and color here, as well as playful foreground and background relationships.
Steir's new works are a celebration of color— specifically the color blue. It is somewhat ironic to learn that eight years ago she was diagnosed with color blindness and learned she cannot see that hue. That being said, Steir still mixes her paints to maximize the subtle differences in this color and through an exploration of both gesture and chance has created a powerful and emotionally complex body of work. Her pieces are simultaneously a formal examination of the properties of color and paint, as well as an experiment in controlled chaos. These large scale paintings take their inspiration not only from color but also from nature (the flow of rivers or rain) and the fluids that run through the human body.