Red and Red
Pat Steir, American, born 1938
2014
Oil on canvas
Overall: 96 × 96 in. (243.8 × 243.8 cm)
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Florence and Lansing Porter Moore 1937 Fund, the Virginia and Preston T. Kelsey 1958 Fund, the William S. Rubin Fund, and through a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Hazen, by exchange
2014.59
Geography
Place Made: United States, North America
Period
21st century
Object Name
Painting
Research Area
Painting
Not on view
Label
Pat Steir has said that she makes her paintings with the attitude of a gymnast: “first the meditation, then the leap.” In her recent paintings, including Red and Red, Steir has poured, splashed, and dripped pigment thinned with turpentine onto vertically hung canvases to create luscious washes and veils of richly colored paint. This practice is informed by the ideas of her friend the late composer John Cage, who similarly embraced chance and accident in his music and performances. Steir has stated, “I’m walking a thin line between image and not image [in this painting], between flat and deep space.”
Best known for her paintings of waterfalls, in which the dripped and splashed paint replicates the natural process of falling water, Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives and works in New York City. While her early monochrome paintings were informed by minimalism and conceptual art, Steir developed a highly personal iconography in the 1970s utilizing isolated brushstrokes and other marks, including words and images that are sometimes crossed out. During the 1980s, she began a way of painting that led to her images of waterfalls and other works that evoked the night sky and the Milky Way.
From the 2019 exhibition The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art, curated by John R. Stomberg Ph.D, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director
Course History
SART 31, SART 72, Painting II, III, Colleen Randall, Spring 2015
SART 31, 72, Painting II, III, Jennifer Caine, Winter 2019
Exhibition History
Pat Steir: For Philadelphia, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 2-June 21, 2014.
The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art, Northeast Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26-December 1, 2019.
Publication History
John R. Stomberg, The Hood Now: Art and Inquiry at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2019, p. 214, ill. plate no. 145.
Provenance
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; sold to present collection, 2014.
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