Pat Steir: Paintings, 2018–2025

A stunning new monograph dedicated to recent work by American artist Pat Steir, counted among the great innovators of contemporary painting.

Since the late 1980s, American artist Pat Steir (b. 1938) has explored the vast formal and lyrical possibilities of her iconic visual idiom, experimenting with gravity’s aleatory effects on paint she pours and throws. This illustrated monograph focuses on the most recent eight years of her paintings, a particularly fruitful period that included large-scale installations at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in 2018, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, in 2019. Designed with Steir’s direct oversight and close involvement, the book’s sequencing suggests the different visual and emotional resonances across her works. A new essay by award-winning Irish writer Colm Tóibín offers a poetic reading of Steir’s paintings and their meanings, and a conversation between Steir and Hirshhorn curator Evelyn C. Hankins discusses Color Wheel, the artist’s installation at the museum, and the connections to Eastern philosophy, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art that are fundamental to her practice.