Pat Steir (Born 1938/40) American, Exhibition Poster 'Night Swing' (Waterfall) 1993. Titled Midsummer Night Swing. Exhibition poster for Lincoln Center's Midsummer Night Swing. Red/Blue Berlin Waterfall. Blue background with a red waterfall. 

Condition: Good. 

Overall Size: 43 7/8 x 40 3/8 in. 

Sight Size: 40 x 37 in. 

#8067 . 

Painter, printmaker Pat Steir is a painter and draftsman of words, letters, signs and symbolic marks, drips and spills applied to paper and canvas.

Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, growing up in a Jersey suburb of Philadelphia. Immersed in a study of the arts and philosophy as a girl, Steir continued her interests at Boston University and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, studying lithography and etching from 1956 to 1962. She received her B.F.A. degree from Pratt in 1961.

After completing her studies, during which she had worked with artists Richard Lindner and Philip Guston, Steir was employed by Harper and Row Publishers in New York City as an art director and book designer from 1966 to 1970. While she continued to paint, it seemed that her attraction to words was a reflection of inborn thinking that directed her into the world of books, and by being in that world, reinforced what she would do with words in her art. Supporting this idea, from 1975 to 1978, she was a member of the editorial board of Semiotext, and a founding board member of Printed Matter Bookshop in New York City.

From 1970 to 1975, she placed words and images on blank, unpainted canvases, crossing out with an X, rather than repainting, anything she did not want left on the canvas. It was a deliberate isolation of image from the ground, word from background, and lack of painterly integration of figure and ground.

Steir first produced color lithographs for Landfall Press in Chicago in 1973, subsequently working with Crown Point Press in Oakland, California. In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited etchings and monotypes from her "After Turner I" and "After Turner II" series.

The artist has also worked with a form of automatism in painting involving a kind of Zen oneness within herself, where, when she senses the arrival of the right moment of inner creative thrust and balance, will sweep a single, elongated paint stroke or two the length of a wall in the execution of over-sized art works.

Pat Steir has exhibited widely around the world.  She has exhibited internationally since the 1970's, including the Whitney Biennial in New York City.

Good.