Pat Steir at Cheim & Read

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Pat Steir is well known for her "waterfall" paintings, which she began to create in the late 1980s. The eight large canvases (all 2007) in her recent solo show may be described with the same general term, as they continue to feature cascades of aqueous pigment. But several of these new paintings strongly evoke the work of Barnett Newman, and thus recall a prior stage of Steir's career--the early 1980s--when she freely mined art history and deliberately quoted the styles of many famous painters who preceded her.

At about 11 by 18 feet, The Dark was one of the two largest paintings in the exhibition and was displayed near the gallery's entrance. Its black expanse is completely covered with thin rivulets of milky blue oil paint, their opacity waxing and waning as they descend the canvas. It looks as if Steir applied a wide strip of masking tape down the center of the painting, roughly covered it with bright red pigment, and then removed the tape to create two scumbled but parallel lines. Against the dark background, these scarlet streaks are startling and somewhat incongruous, as though one were viewing a moonlit rain shower through a Newman "zip" painting.

An ensemble of five very similar works (all but one oriented vertically) surrounded the viewer in the gallery's main room. Steir applied multiple layers of black, white, gray and silver paint to these canvases, ultimately generating large, rectangular zones of color that are bisected and/or framed by vertical bands. In Light, for example, a darkly painted ground is mostly obscured by two adjacent veils of white and silver paint that Steir drizzled from top to bottom. These roughly equivalent cascades do not quite meet at the center of the canvas, revealing a narrow strip of the black underpainting. A similar composition is achieved in About the Black I, where the right half of a black ground is covered with a wide pour of white paint. The left edge of the white area has been painted with vigor, sending sparklike splatters into the neighboring darkness. The severe palettes and subdivided compositions of all five paintings are reminiscent of Newman's Stations of the Cross, especially since they were installed as a suite for this show. And like that older artist's work, Steir's repeated contrasts of light and darkness may convey a spiritual message to some viewers.

For two paintings in the gallery's rear room, Steir dispensed with vertical subdivisions and presented her "waterfall" motif in a more familiar guise. To create Sunspots II, she poured a luxurious gold pigment down an aquamarine ground, creating an uneven, shimmering V-shape that spans the entire canvas. In the context of this generally austere exhibition, the painting asserted itself like a proud peacock, and suggested that Steir has not fully abandoned the ravishments of color.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning