Pat Steir

‘Painted Rain’ fills the gallery's West Hollywood space with canvases that take as their origin point Steir’s recollections of her time in Los Angeles, in particular, the ocean and sky she experienced while teaching at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the 1970s.

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.

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. Perhaps most evocative of the sky among the works on view is ‘Blue’ (2022 – 23). Pale azure variations are finely stacked in the middle of a 9 by 8-foot expanse where a stunning swath of white pours out into a blue mist. Oscillating, yet held together by both gravity and Steir’s soft but determined gridlines, the canvas achieves an astonishing alchemy of control and chaos, of the familiar and the infinite. ‘Blue’ is an enveloping homage to the color from which it takes its title.

Complementing her paintings on view in West Hollywood, Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles art center will feature a special presentation of Steir’s limited-edition etchings and aquatints from the 1990s and early 2000s, produced in collaboration with San Francisco’s Crown Point Press, highlighting the artist’s longstanding explorations with printmaking and its importance within her practice.