Pat Steir at Hauser & Wirth

Pat Steir, Painted Rain (installation view) (2024). Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

I first visited Painted Rain, Pat Steir’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, amid a pummeling rainstorm. Steir’s dripping rivulets of pigment mirrored the deluge outside, her works luminous despite the absence of sunlight. The artist, 85, recently revealed that she had been diagnosed with colorblindness—specifically, the inability to perceive the color blue¹—a startling admission given her decades-long career as an adroit colorist who probes the potentialities of abstraction. For this solo exhibition, her first in Los Angeles in over thirty years, she chose to plumb the depths of a color she cannot herself see, creating a series of fourteen large-scale paintings dedicated to the mercurial blues that comprise our oceans and skies. Just as the ocean’s surface cloaks the abyss lurking beneath, Steir’s paintings quietly point to color’s mutability as a perceptual screen that shapes our subjective reality.

While the color blue functions as a central tenet of the exhibition, Steir’s overall palette is far more expansive and sophisticated than a simple daub of pigment. The works in her Waterfall series (1988–present), named for her process of layering brushstrokes with drips and pours of paint, appear subtly kaleidoscopic: Each contains fluctuating layers of expertly mixed pigment, from hues of scarlet and moss to lemon and lapis. Honed through decades of experimentation, Steir’s process nimbly balances the physics of chance—i.e. how cascading paint may spill and puddle—with the precision of her brush. As seen in Painted Rain #5 (2022–23), which features a controlled torrent of oxblood, marigold, and tangerine set against a midnight background, the cadence of her paintings balances moments of gestural intricacy with bursts of chromatic expulsion, hinting at kinetic energies brewing beneath the surface.

While the arresting visual and philosophical associations of the color blue have informed the work of countless artists and writers—among them Derek Jarman and Maggie Nelson—Steir’s paintings appear to revel solely in the pigment’s optical and physical properties as a haptic material. And because color is primarily a matter of light, her specific focus on the color blue makes light itself an integral ingredient in the work’s visual dynamism. As such, these paintings also nod to the ineffable subjectivity of perception. Humans perceive the sky and ocean as blue, for example, due to the physics of scattered light waves. Other living beings experience colors imperceptible to us, a dizzying prospect that punctures our objective conception of the world. Nelson touches upon this idea in Bluets (2009), writing “There are no instruments for measuring color…How could there be, as ‘color knowledge’ always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver?”²

Nelson’s discussion of color knowledge comes to mind when viewing Blue (2022–23), the only work in the exhibition painted solely in blue tones. Here, a lightly drawn grid overlays a cornflower blue ground awash with tiny veins and channels of turquoise pigment that dribble down from the top of the canvas. In the center of the composition, slabs of short, horizontal brushstrokes, from azure to eggshell, pile on top of each other like a stack of bleeding pancakes. Their tonal range is condensed, making the shifts between hues subtle and nuanced and heightening the sense of intrigue surrounding the work’s gestural language, suggesting that abstraction, like color, also flirts with the veils of our subjectivity. As such, Steir’s paintings function somewhat as veils themselves. Their prismatic layers of trickles and drips hint at the presence of diaphanous, partly-obscured worlds beyond their immediate surfaces––the perception of which remains contingent on the eye of the beholder. 

Pat Steir: Painted Rain runs from February 28–May 4, 2024 at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood (8980 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069).

Pat Steir, Painted Rain #5 (2022–23). Oil on canvas, 84 x 54 x 1.75 inches. © Pat Steir. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Pat Steir, Blue (2022–23). Oil on canvas, 96 x 84 x 1.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Pat Steir, Painted Rain (installation view) (2024). Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Pat Steir, Painted Rain (installation view) (2024). Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Pat Steir, Painted Rain (installation view) (2024). Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Pat Steir, Friday Circus (2022–23). Oil on canvas, 84 x 54 x 1.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Pat Steir, Painted Rain (installation view) (2024). Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Pat Steir, Garden (2022–23). Oil on canvas, 84 x 54 x 1.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Jessica Simmons-Reid (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; BA, Brown University) is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. She’s interested in the interstitial space between the language of abstraction and the abstraction of language, as well as the intermingling of poetry and politics. She has contributed essays and reviews to Carla and Artforum, among others.

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