Pat Steir
Rainbow Waterfall #3
‘The color wheel is historical. The first one was made by Isaac Newton, and the most famous one is by Goethe. It’s not standardized—every scientist and artist’s is different—but what is standard are the primary colors. You start with red, yellow, and blue, and then their opposites… and all the permutations in between. For me, this was a gigantic adventure in color.’—Pat Steir [1]
With its saturated flows of primary colors cascading over a crimson field, ‘Rainbow Waterfall #3’ (2022) is a testament to the vitality and elegance of Pat Steir’s masterful hand. Demonstrating the artist’s commitment to material exploration and experimentation, this work offers a throughline in Steir’s decades-long career while simultaneously ascending to bold new heights of expression. In dialogue with nature and process, Steir continues to build on her iconic Waterfall works, producing an exceptional example that captivates and draws us in with its larger-than-life presence.
Characterized by foundational primaries, ‘Rainbow Waterfall #3’ can be seen as an extension of the artist’s monumental ‘Color Wheel’ (2018-19) installation commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Proposing an ongoing investigation of the color spectrum, with each work informing the next, ‘Rainbow Waterfall #3’ emerges from a series demarcated by its reference to atmospheric and earthbound phenomena, making its debut in Steir’s inaugural show at Hauser & Wirth, ‘Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls,’ in 2022.
Engaging with a range of art historical references, spanning East Asian art and philosophy, the renaissance and modernism, including John Cage's embrace of chance as a compositional strategy, Steir’s paintings propose a meditation on perception, representation and the nature of painting itself. Although her works often allude to the natural world, like waterfalls, Steir does not depict her subject in a traditional sense. Rather, she embodies its dynamic, stating: ‘I work with an awareness of how chaotic nature is; something that I do not plan may happen. I paint water often, but I don’t depict it; it is the paint itself that flows.’ [2]
Steir’s method involves applying a system of random occurrences, thoughtfully selecting colors and focusing on targeted areas of action. Leaning her canvas against the wall, she pours paint from above, coating the surface, then, with a loaded brush, allows the medium to stream down from each deliberate stroke in drips and rivulets, emulating the properties of water. Within this system lies the visceral manifestation of the creative act, its fluidity and fixedness. Within this act, the artist finds beauty in limitations and views her painting as a collaborative counterpart. [3]
Commanding in scale, color and expressive vigor, ‘Rainbow Waterfall #3’ advances art historical and philosophical dialogues to mesmerizing effect, simultaneously evoking and deconstructing the primary hued, quadratic and linear-driven surfaces of Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. However, rather than leaning on the influence of her artistic forbearers, Steir’s subject is, as she has said, the ‘paintings that make themselves and the line between perceived reality and abstraction,’ extending a multifaceted lineage into an ingenious pictorial language, unfixed and unmatched. [4]
About the artist
One of the great innovators of contemporary painting, Pat Steir first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s five-decade career continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to the materiality of paint and process.
Artwork images © Pat Steir. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
Portrait of Pat Steir © Pat Steir. Photo: Grace Roselli
1.) Pat Steir quoted in ‘Pat Steir on poetry and the color wheel,’ in Artforum, October 29, 2019, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/pat-steir-on-poetry-and-the-color-wheel-81166.
2.) Pat Steir quoted in ‘Within the Interspace between Reality and Reality,’ in ‘Pat Steir. Paintings,’ Milan/IT: Charta, 2007, p. 15.
3.) Ibid., p. 15.
4.) Pat Steir quoted in ‘Studio Conversations: Pat Steir and Doris von Drathen. What do I see—What can I see?’ p. 32.