PAT STEIR: PAINTED RAIN
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood presents Painted Rain by the celebrated American artist Pat Steir. The exhibition will show canvases that take as their origin point Steir’s recollections of her time in Los Angeles.
February 28 – May 4, 2024
With their reverberating tones, the new works on view are united by Steir’s exploration of the color blue, here punctuated by other vivid hues, achieving and obtaining mesmerizing optical effects via the artist’s signature streaming, pouring and layering technique. The luminous results extend and expand Steir’s ongoing Waterfall series wherein she intentionally cedes control and allows the paint to create its own image.
The expressive power of the canvases in ‘Painted Rain’ affirms Steir’s position as one of the most enduringly original contemporary painters whose conceptual practice challenges and transcends the divide between figuration and abstraction.
The paintings that will line the walls of West Hollywood’s skylit space together form an undulating current, a river of color and energy that accrues from the rivulets of aqueous pigment cascading in each canvas. Against the delicate and complex verticality of their grounds, thick bands of horizontal paint attach the viewer’s focus to the specific lines and curves—the central points of action in the different paintings.
Steir begins each of her monumental works by employing a Verdaccio underpainting technique first popularized during the Italian Renaissance: she primes her canvases in green, endowing their backgrounds with a distinct glow that radiates into and through the work. On top of this ground, she overlays a grid of chalk lines, forming a faint scaffolding on which she plans her composition.
Carefully calibrating the opacity and viscosity of each pigment, Steir then begins her process of pouring, allowing the twinning of gravity and chance to chart out the path of each stream. The results—breathtaking rivers and showers of color—materialize her relentless inquiry of the circular relationship between abstraction and representation.
In ‘Painted Rain #2’ (2022 – 23), lines of purple, orange and green are suspended in a single column that morphs into a torrent of red and white paint, shimmering amid electric streams of a sea-like plane. In ‘Friday Circus’ (2022 – 23) the wavelike hairs of Steir’s brush form slightly rounded and upturned strokes that rest in perfect tension with the spilling red lines below.