Pat Steir, known for her monumental, abstract “Waterfall” paintings, in which she poured paint down the surface to create veils of color, died at 87 on March 25th. Her death was confirmed by her husband Joost Elffers, niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of her representing gallery, Hauser & Wirth.
"Working so closely with Pat Steir—spending so much time with her, immersed in her work together and enjoying such a close friendship—counts among the great privileges of my career,” Payot said in a statement. “She emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism, but Pat created a visual language wholly her own – a new kind of abstraction that encompasses poetry and philosophy, in a practice that also involved writing, performance, and mentoring.”
Steir sustained a decades-long practice that explored abstraction through repetition, balancing control with chance happenings. She poured paint onto giant canvases from the top of a ladder or lift to create her colorful, asynchronous paintings. Throughout her career, she welcomed the chaos as a way to teach herself and discover something new. “Learning means putting one foot in front of the other,” she told Artsy in an interview pegged to her show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2024. “Sometimes you don’t learn correctly and make a misstep; other times you learn correctly and find a beautiful way.”
Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 and grew up surrounded by art. Her parents attended art school, so Steir pursued the arts herself and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1962. She started her career in publishing, working as an art director for Harper & Row. Shortly after, she started teaching at Parsons School of Design and the California Institute of the Arts, among others. Alongside her partner, fellow artist Sol LeWitt, she co-founded Printed Matter—New York’s beloved art book non-profit.
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Steir’s paintings became increasingly abstract. Then, in the 1980s, she started experimenting with paint pouring. These entropic paintings, where paint succumbed to gravity’s will, became her “Waterfall” series. In her interview with Artsy, she said these paintings are left up to “gravity and chance.” Steir first presented them at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1990.
The artist maintained a studio practice into her 80s. Her most recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in 2019, The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 2019, and the Long Museum in China in 2021. Hauser & Wirth staged two solo shows of her work in New York and Zurich last year.
“She was so devoted body and soul to the medium of painting itself, to experimentation, that she has left behind one of the great legacies that will continue to inspire and provoke new conversations,” Payot said. “That Pat worked until the very last of her days is a testament to the power of her vision and the fierceness of will that really defines great artists.”
