For Philadelphia Three, 2013

Oil on canvas
© Pat Steir. Photo courtesy the artist and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.

Raised near Philadelphia, Pat Steir benefited greatly from that city’s cultural institutions: paintings by European modernists shaped her early artistic education, as did Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Large Glass (1915–23) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the 1980s, Steir began to experiment with poured paint, producing the “waterfall” paintings for which she is best known. To create them, she thinned paint with turpentine into different consistencies before pouring it down from a height onto unstretched canvases tacked to the studio wall. Over time, Steir’s “waterfall” paintings evolved into a series the artist has referred to as “the Split.” She produces these works using the same pouring technique but layers the paint in broader swaths and bifurcates the canvases vertically at the center. For Philadelphia Three, the third in a trio of works named for the city, seems to evoke the stonework of the Philadelphia Museum of Art itself in its luminous yellow and ocher tones.