Pat Steir

The Hirshhorn will host the largest site-specific exhibition to date by the acclaimed abstract painter Pat Steir. The exhibition is an expansive new suite of the artist’s signature Waterfall paintings, spanning the entire perimeter of the museum’s second-floor inner-circle galleries, extending nearly four hundred linear feet. Marking Steir’s first solo exhibition in Washington in nearly five decades, these immersive works will transform the Museum into a vibrant spectrum of color.

The twenty-eight large-scale paintings, when presented together as a group, will create an immense color wheel that shifts hues with each painting, with the pours on each canvas often appearing in the complementary hue of the monochrome background.

Over the past four decades, Steir has produced a commanding body of abstract paintings that draw on the artist’s distinctive method of combining meticulous brushwork with multiple layers of drips and pours, simultaneously carefully calibrated and apparently random. Drawing on motifs from Chinese ink painting and gestural abstraction, Steir’s Waterfalls are formed by brushing and pouring multiple layers of paint, allowing gravity to guide the cascading forms. 

As her most quintessential abstractions, Waterfalls echo the metaphysical ideas of harmony with nature expressed in Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, even as they redefine the conventional flat picture plane to sculpt deep, transcendent space. 

At the Hirshhorn, the suite of twenty-eight paintings will activate the entire gallery as visitors walk around the space, exploring the wheel’s spectrums. Moreover, Steir’s paintings will create a dialogue with the Gordon Bunshaft-designed outdoor fountain and seasonal changes visible through the museum’s windows.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website