Double White on Black

In the late 1980s, Pat Steir began her illustrious technique of pouring and flinging paint onto a hanging canvas, allowing gravity and chance to determine the path of the composition and removing herself from the consciousness of artistic creation. She maintains, however, a rigorous control over her technique, a method that has been deeply inspired by Taoism and Buddhism. “You don't touch the canvas. You pour or throw paint. You put each color on separately. Don't blend colors. So I have my set of rules that I stick to, limitations more than rules” (P. Steir, quoted in J. O. Richard and P. Steir, “Oral History Interview with Pat Steir, 2008 March 1-2,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-pat-steir-13682#transcript). The resulting sense of contemplative deliberation comes through in the present work, a large-scale and alluring example from 2009. Its binary presentation of lustrous silver recalls the compositional structure of Barnett Newman’s signature “zip” paintings. Indeed, critics have drawn parallels between Steir’s work and that of Newman, as well as Jackson Pollock, and laud her ability to both embrace of the foundations of Abstract Expressionism and carve out her own space within its canon. “I feel that, among other artists, I am making some of the last late Modernist paintings” (P. Steir, quoted in T. McEvilley, Pat Steir, New York, 1995, p. 76).