![]() To create the perfect hues, Steir began by painting her canvasses with a green color that she says pushes light out, much like sepia tones in old photographs do. The color of each canvas is juxtaposed with a swipe of its complementary color, the excess of which drips down in bright strands. Her version orders canvases washed with the primary color transitioning from red to purple counter-clockwise around the viewing space. Steir nixes science to craft a wheel that reflects her own perception of color. Originally created by Isaac Newton, the color wheel is a traditionally scientific illustration of the way different hues relate to each other. But there’s always intention in setting limits,” Steir says.Īlex Munro, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden “By pouring or throwing the paint, I take myself out of the painting. “They are all the same and not alike,” Steir says. In Color Wheel, though each canvas is merely one component of the collective work, they are uniquely nuanced. ![]() ![]() If she was going to be an artist who had said, ‘I only make abstractions,’ she would have shut down the possibilities through her use of titles.” “That's why she called her paintings ‘waterfalls’ for so many years. “The willingness to open up the paintings for figurative references is okay,” Hankins says. For instance, though her acclaimed “Waterfall” series are non-pictorial, they draw on Japanese landscape brush paintings whose depictions of cascading water resembles the flow of paint on Steir’s canvases. Still, she doesn’t label her paintings solely as abstractions nor figurative pieces. Rather than limit her artwork to specific imagery, she relies on abstraction, opening it up to the viewer’s interpretations. Inspired by artists like John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Steir heavily considers the role of chance in creating her work, surrendering some control to the force of gravity on the paint’s path. I really believe that if you’re looking for a means of self-expression, you should see a therapist. “I’m not totally out of it, but I’m not using it to express myself. But there’s always intention in setting limits,” Steir says. Oftentimes, after a day of working on a canvas, she says she returns to the studio the next morning impressed and surprised at how the paint settled. Using a dripping technique, she says, is not “macho enough” for her, preferring instead to fling it with powerful strokes or pour it deliberately. To create her works, Steir vertically mounts her canvases and standing on the studio floor or a ladder, pours or throws the paint. “She’s at a point in her career where she was ready to create a really large, important project.”įor more than 40 years, Steir has made abstract paintings using the signature technique she employs in Color Wheel. “My thought was, why not give her this space and see what she can do?” says Evelyn Hankins, senior curator at the Hirshhorn, who oversaw the show. (Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Gordon Bunshaft, the Hirshhorn has been playfully referred to as a “Brutalist donut.”) At 400 linear feet and traversing the inner circle gallery, Color Wheel is Steir’s largest site-specific installation to date. “Pat Steir: Color Wheel,” which recently opened at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is a piece the museum commissioned to make use of the building’s iconic circular form. Each canvas seems a masterpiece in and of itself, but as one traverses the circular hallway where they are hanging, the full wheel is revealed, taking the viewer on a journey through a rainbow of Steir’s design. It’s an immersive, larger-than-life collection of 30 canvasses, each dressed with layers of paint rich in texture and vibrancy. Pat Steir’s color wheel is not the flat, carefully measured disk used to teach children the difference between primary and secondary colors.
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