It is with profound sadness that we bid farewell to Pat Steir, who passed away yesterday at the age of 87 in Manhattan. She had been associated with our gallery since its founding in 1991, who joined our program with our founding partner, Eric Franck. We are proud of our long relationship with this remarkable artist and will miss her as a friend and as a singularly incisive voice in the arts. With her, artists of her generation lose an important and deeply valued point of reference.
Through her distinctive painterly methods, which recalibrate the relationship between intentionality and withdrawal, between assertion and relinquishing control, she inscribed a unique and lasting dynamic into contemporary painting. In her works, color is not merely applied but transformed into a process that allows the image to emerge as an event: flowing, sedimenting, emerging as trace. In this way, a pictorial space arises in which temporality and materiality are not represented but enacted performatively.
Steir’s work moves within a precise balance between conceptual order and poetic reduction, where references to nature and perception are articulated not as representations but as structuring forces. With her passing, the art world loses a voice that saw the image as something shaped both by the process of its making and by the contingent, interwoven steps that come together to form a whole.
