Unfixing the Traditional: Dominique Lévy Announce Gallery Representation of Pat Steir
Dominique Lévy have today announced the gallery's representation of artist Pat Steir, who first gained recognition in the early 1970s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. Steir's innovative pour technique, exemplified by the artist's Waterfall canvases, positioned her at the forefront of American painting in the late 1980s. Bridging the sensibilities of Eastern philosophy, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual art, Steir’s five-decade practice puts into play a new framework of space and perception.
Dominique Lévy will feature a large Waterfall painting by Steir at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel next month. A major solo exhibition of the artist’s work is planned for the gallery's London space in September 2016. Featuring site-specific wall drawing installations as well as a focused survey of Steir’s Waterfall paintings, the exhibition will be the artist’s first in London in nearly twenty-five years. This survey will travel to New York in 2017, with an addition of Steir’s newest paintings. Dominique Lévy will publish a scholarly catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition.
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1940, Pat Steir studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. In 1963, she was invited to participate in her first group show at The High Museum in Atlanta. The next year, her work appeared in group shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in The Museum of Modern Art’s Drawing exhibition, making her a key figure among the first wave of women artists to gain prominence in the New York art world.
Steir was lauded for her monochromatic canvases featuring various iconographic symbols—most prominently roses, inspired by Shakespeare’s famous aphorism, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” and Gertrude Stein’s retort, “A rose is a rose is a rose”—crossed out with ‘X’ figures. Of this act of effacement, the artist explains, “I wanted to destroy images as symbols. To make the image a symbol for a symbol. I had to act it out―make the image and cross it out.” This series marks the artist’s first engagement with questions of representation and semantic signification. Steir continues to explore these issues, working to unfix the tradition of representation in landscape painting, instead evoking the meaning of landscape without imagery as such.
Steir’s work has been included in hundreds of group shows and is held in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide including: Denver Art Museum; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Louvre, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Gallery, London, among other institutions.
Along with lecturing at museums and universities, Steir is the recipient of several awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1973).
In 1991, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and, in 2001, received the Boston University School for the Arts Distinguished Alumni Award.
