#rip pat steir

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Pat Steir (1938–2026)

Widely regarded as a pioneer of postmodern abstraction, she is most famous for her iconic "Waterfall" series, which she began in the late 1980s.

In these works, she famously abandoned traditional brushwork to pour and splash thinned oil paint onto large canvases, allowing gravity and chance to create cascading, luminous compositions.

She was a trailblazer for women in the male-dominated New York art scene a founding member of the feminist journal Heresies.

Born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in Newark, New Jersey, she studied at the Pratt Institute and Boston University. Throughout her five-decade career, she also worked as an art director at Harper & Row and helped found the Printed Matter bookstore. In 2017, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Her work is held in permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum, Tate Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Rest in Power !

"Monk Tuyu Meditating Waterfall," 1991, Oil on canvas, 149 3/8 x 114 5/8 in. (379.4 x 291.1 cm.)

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Pat Steir (1938–2026)

Widely regarded as a pioneer of postmodern abstraction, she is most famous for her iconic "Waterfall" series, which she began in the late 1980s.

In these works, she famously abandoned traditional brushwork to pour and splash thinned oil paint onto large canvases, allowing gravity and chance to create cascading, luminous compositions.

She was a trailblazer for women in the male-dominated New York art scene a founding member of the feminist journal Heresies.

Born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in Newark, New Jersey, she studied at the Pratt Institute and Boston University. Throughout her five-decade career, she also worked as an art director at Harper & Row and helped found the Printed Matter bookstore. In 2017, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Her work is held in permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum, Tate Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Rest in Power !

Pat Steir photographed by Eric Boman, 1990

© Eric Boman Archive

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Pat Steir (1938–2026),

"Intro 1," 1976 (part of the Burial Mound Series).

This work is a significant early example of her conceptual approach to printmaking, produced during a period when she was deconstructing traditional artistic symbols like the rose and exploring the relationship between marks and meaning.

During the mid-1970s, Steir was deeply involved in the New York conceptual art scene. In the same year she created Introduction 1, she also helped launch Printed Matter, the iconic artist bookstore and publisher.

Her work from this era often utilized a grid or cross to negate imagery, a technique intended to "destroy images as symbols" and focus the viewer on the physical reality of the paint or ink mark itself. This conceptual foundation eventually led to her famous "Waterfall" series in the late 1980s, where she allowed gravity and the materiality of the medium to dictate the final composition.

Printed by Timothy F. Berry at Landfall Press,

Sheet: approx. 26.5 × 26.5 cm (Plate: approx. 25.0 × 25.0 cm).

Rest In Power !