Description:
The painter Pat Steir (b. 1940) first began exhibiting in her early 20s in New York, in an art world infatuated with Andy Warhol but still very much in the thrall of the abstract expressionists, of Pollock, Rothko, and Hans Hoffman. The "drip" paintings that she is most famous for grew from a four-painting series of the same subject, a rolling wave, with seasonal titles, beginning with Autumn: The Wave After Courbet as though Painted by Turner with the Chinese in Mind (1985). These were the first paintings in which she played on the edge between nonobjective painting and representation, the point at which splats and drips resolve themselves into a perceived image. And so began her preoccupation, as John Yau notes in his accompanying essay, with the relationship between landscape and abstraction, as well as her distinctive application of paint. A brief, beautifully printed monograph, Dazzling Water, Dazzling Light concludes with an interview by Barbara Weidle, in which Steir discusses her infatuation with visual perception and her "unstylish" interest in beauty: "It happened accidentally at first that the paintings looked beautiful. I wasn't after beauty and I was surprised to see that some of them did look beautiful. But now I want them to be beautiful. Yes, it became a big interest. Because light became interesting to me. And I think every painter who is interested in light is interested in beauty, it sort of follows." --Regina Marler
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