Silver
2018
Oil on canvas

Pat Steir (b. 1940, Newark, New Jersey) developed an interest in art at a young age. She began her formal art training in 1956, studying graphic arts at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she eventually received her BFA in 1962. There, she was influenced by her teachers Richard Lindner and Phillip Guston, who encouraged her to find her own style rather than follow popular ideas and techniques. It was Steir’s training in graphic arts and illustration that allowed her to develop her eclectic visual vocabulary.

Though with her early work, Steir was loosely allied with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, she is best-recognized for dripped, splashed and poured “waterfall” paintings that she first started in the late 1980s. Steir is also profoundly influenced by Chinese painting traditions and techniques, especially the inky marks of the eighth- and ninth- century Yi-pin “ink-splashing” painters, and Taoist philosophy’s aspiration for harmonious, unfettered connections between man, nature and the cosmos.