Spaightwood Galleries

Last updated: 8/4/07
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Pat Steir (American, b. 1938)
Although Steir first came to prominence in the 1978 exhibition of the New Image Painters at the Whitney Museum, she seems more interested, according to G. Roger Denson's essay, "Watercourse Way," in the November 1999 issue of Art in America (which also features one of her waterfall paintings on the cover) in rethinking the history of art. For Denson, Steir's work, "whatever else it may be, is also a fervant, ongoing conversation with art history, including 19th-century Romantic painting, Abstract Expressionism, and Chinese painting, especially in her waterfall series. Denson also makes the case, however, that Steir has taken a Daoist view of the nature of art and of the relationship of art to nature: "What attracts her is the Dao's poetic picturing of mankind's relationship with the ancient elemental quaternity of earth, air, fire, and water. . . .Daoist principles help not only to explain Steir's painting style and it's conflation of abstraction and representation, but also to elucidate the links between late modernist painting in the West and Asian paintig. . . . In many senses . . . Asian painting of the last two millenia is closer in temperment to modern Western art than is European painting of the 14th through 18th centuries. . . . . The object in nature serves as raw material which must be transformed into an artistic idiom, and the mode of this transformation, the character of the lines and the forms produced by the brush, reveals something about the person who drew them." (115-16). In Steir's case, what they tell us is that we are looking at the works of someone whose painting is both a conceptual act and an expression of an inner self via a mastery of technique, someone for whom head and heart and hand are all in play in each artistic work.

Steir has had over 120 one-person shows in galleries and museums in the U.S., Europe, and Japan; her work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney (NY), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hirschhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), the Chicago Art Institute, the Walker Art Center(Minneapolis), the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée D'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, The Tate Gallery (London), the Cabinet d'Estampes (Geneva), and many others.

Bibliography: Elizabeth Form Broun, Illusion Myth: Prints and Drawings of Pat Steir (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1983); Holland Cotter, Pat Steir. Waterfalls (NY: Robert Miller Gallery, 1990); G. Roger Denson, "Watercourse Way," Art in America (November 1999), Front cover + 114-21); Lisa Liebmann, Pat Steir: Waterfalls (Tampa: Art Museum, University of South Florida, 1990); Marti Mayo, Linda L. Cathcart, Ted Castle, Arbitrary Order: Paintings by Pat Steir (Houston. Contemporary Arts Museum, 1983); Thomas McEvilley, Pat Steir (NY: Harry N Abrams, 1995), Carter Ratcliff, Pat Steir Paintings (NY: Abrams, 1986), Juliane Willi et al, Pat Steir: Gravures/Prints 1976-1988 (London: Tate Gallery, 1988); John Yau and Pat Steir, Dazzling Water, Dazzling Light: Pat Steir Paintings (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
Kyoto Chrysanthemum (Spencer 16). Original 26-color woodcut, 1982. Edition: 200 signed and numbered impressions plus 20 artist proofs, all on handmade Kozo paper. Printed in Japan for the Crown Point Press. Steir went to Japan and worked with a Japanese woodblock cutter. The print was made from 20 woodblocks. Image size:369x516mm. Price: $3500.
Who. Original drypoint, 1988. Edition: 63 signed & numbered impressions (of which ours is 61/63) plus IV trial proofs for the Tate Gallery Catalogue raisonne of Steir's prints, Pat Steir: Gravures / Prints 1976-1988 (London: Tate Gallery, 1988). Printed on wove Lana by Michael Duplain at the Atelier de taille-douce de Saint-Prex. There are also IV trial proofs on Arches (on the lower left of our print, the number II/IV was erased but is barely visible if one looks for it). All impressions printed in black and bistre ink. Image size: 200x201mm. Price: $1250.
Berlin Waterfall. Original color silkscreen, 1993. Edition: 108 signed and numbered impressions plus 18 artist's proofs. Published by the Lincoln Center Print and Poster preogram. Image size: 985x940mm. Price: $3250.
Untitled (Composition in Red and Black on Rives BFK). Original color lithograph and silkscreen, 1998. Edition: 30 signed & numbered impressions publshed by Landfall Press. There are also 10 artist's proofs, 10 subscriber's proofs, 6 Landfall proofs, and 3 printer's proofs. Ours is n. 6/6 of the Landfall proofs with their stamp and catalogue number PS 98-11 on the verso lower left. Steir is one of the most important artists of her generation. In the past few years, she has been the subject of several books. Image size: 302x302mm. Price: $1800.
Composition in Gray. Original color lithograph and silkscreen, 1998. Edition: 35 signed & numbered impressions publshed by Landfall Press. There are also 10 artist's proofs, 5 subscriber's proofs, 5 Landfall proofs, and 3 printer's proofs. Ours is the copyright proof. Image size: 494x494mm. Price: $2500.

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Spaightwood Galleries is located at 120 Main St (aka Highway 140) in Upton MA at the corner of Main St and Maple Ave in a rehabilitated Unitarian Church. For directions and visiting information, please call. We are, of course, always available over the web and by telephone (see above for contact information). Click the following for links to past shows and artists. For a visual tour of the gallery, please click here. For information about Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner, please click here. For a list of special offers currently available, see Specials.

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