October 04, 2024 - January 12, 2025
Lee Ufan Arles invites the great American contemporary artist Pat Steir to take over Atelier MA, opposite Hôtel Vernon.
The exhibition Pat Steir, Light on Water brings together two bodies of rare and previously unseen works on paper by the renowned artist Pat Steir. Known for her paintings, Steir has been actively drawing since the early 1970s.
In 1989, Pat Steir began her celebrated Waterfall series, in which she cascades paint down the length of the canvas, deliberately abandoning her process to gravity and chance. At this time, Steir produced the six drawings that make up the Light on Water series by pouring and combining oil paint and watercolor on handmade paper.
Drawings from the Light on Water series will be exhibited alongside an untitled series from 2005. Distilling her pictorial process down to the decisive moment of contact with paper, these drawings testify to the place given to chance in the artist's work, when she lets paint take on its own shape.
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, Pat Steir is one of the leading figures in contemporary painting. She became known in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings.
In the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting-the rigorous casting technique visible in her Waterfall series, in which she exploited the forces of gravity and gesture to create works of incredible lyricism-won critical acclaim.
Driven by a deep interest in art history and Eastern philosophy, as well as a genuine commitment to artistic creation in the visual and literary fields, Pat Steir's legendary career continues its bold trajectory through the exploration and experimentation of materials.
Top image: Light on Water VI 1990 © Pat Steir Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth