Pat Steir

When I started to pour paint, there was no return—you can’t un-pour it. It’s there. So I could start a new one, but I couldn’t change what I had. Like life.
—Pat Steir

Gagosian is pleased to present Pat Steir: Paintings, an exhibition of new and recent works by the renowned American painter. Opening at Gagosian Rome on March 10, 2022, this is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.

With a storied career spanning more than five decades, Pat Steir is a trailblazing presence in contemporary painting. She was one of the few women who came to prominence in the New York art scene of the 1970s, initially pairing iconic images and texts to interrogate the nature of representation. However, in the mid-1980s, inspired by East Asian art and philosophy, she adopted a looser, more performative approach to painting. Harnessing the forces of gravity and gesture, she developed techniques of pouring, splashing, and brushing thinned paint onto canvas, often working at a monumental scale. Influenced in part by John Cage’s embrace of chance operations as a compositional strategy in music, and informed by Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, and Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, among other rich and diverse artistic and literary sources, Steir has evolved an intuitive and mindful rejoinder to the innovations of postwar abstraction. In her latest works, with their bold forays into new chromatic territories, she continues to further her painterly investigations with regard to the roles of intention and improvisation, process and perception in pictorial structure.