represent

Last call for Pat Steir

Pat Steir. Rainbow Waterfall #5.oil on canvas, 108 x 108

Get to Hauser and Wirth in the next day or two, your last chance to get a glimpse of Pat Steir’s powerfully simplified and radiantly colorful drip paintings, including the largest canvas she’s ever done. She reduces her methods to the most uniform imagery, from painting to painting–working slight variations in color and scale, with an almost Warholesque sense of choosing color schemes within the repetitive armature of an almost identical shape. Chalk lines form a faint grid against which the random journey of the drips sink downward. More to the point, these paintings do what the great color field mimimalists did, severely simplifying the means of making an image and then finding limitless prospects for wildly different states of consciousness as you move from one immersive field of color to the next.  The resplendent paintings hum with life. There’s a great review of the show at Hyperallergic.