Pat Steir, Known For Her Colorful, Cascading“Waterfall” Paintings, Dies At 87. Artsy

Pat Steir, the American painter celebrated for her large-scale“Waterfall” abstractions - luminous curtains of color formed by poured paint - died on March 25 at 87. Her death was confirmed by her husband, Joost Elffers; her niece, Lily Sukoneck-Cohen; and Marc Payot, president of her representing gallery, Hauser & Wirth.

Steir's signature works look at once deliberate and surrendered: paint released from the top of the canvas, then allowed to run, pool, and thin into translucent bands. The“Waterfall” paintings, which she began presenting publicly in 1990 at the Robert Miller Gallery, made a simple physical fact - gravity - into a compositional engine. Over decades, she returned to the format with a discipline that never felt static, using repetition as a way to invite variation.

In a statement, Payot described working with Steir as“among the great privileges” of his career, noting that while she emerged from the intellectual climates of minimalism and conceptualism, she developed“a visual language wholly her own.” He emphasized the breadth of her practice, which extended beyond painting to include writing, performance, and mentoring.

Steir's studio process was famously physical. She poured paint down monumental canvases, often from a ladder or lift, calibrating what she could - color, viscosity, timing - and accepting what she could not. The resulting surfaces carry the record of both control and chance: a measured release, followed by the unpredictable choreography of drips and rivulets.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938, Steir grew up in a household attuned to art; her parents attended art school. She graduated from Pratt Institute in 1962 and began her professional life in publishing, working as an art director at Harper & Row. Teaching became another pillar of her career, with posts that included Parsons School of Design and the California Institute of the Arts.

Her paintings moved steadily toward abstraction through the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, she began experimenting with paint pouring, a shift that opened the door to the entropic logic of the“Waterfall” series. Speaking about the works in a 2024 interview tied to a Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles exhibition, Steir framed the practice as a form of ongoing learning - a willingness to risk missteps in pursuit of discovery.

Steir also helped shape the ecosystem around contemporary art. Alongside fellow artist Sol LeWitt, she co-founded Printed Matter, the New York nonprofit devoted to artists' books that has become a cornerstone of the city's publishing and exhibition culture.

Even as her reputation solidified, Steir maintained an active studio practice into her 80s. In recent years, her work was the subject of major solo presentations at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2019), The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (2019), and the Long Museum in China (2021). Hauser & Wirth mounted two solo exhibitions of her work in New York and Zurich last year, underscoring the continued appetite for a body of work that feels both rigorous and open-ended.

In his statement, Payot said Steir's devotion to painting and experimentation left“one of the great legacies” of contemporary abstraction, adding that she worked“until the very last of her days.” For an artist who built a career on the tension between intention and surrender, the“Waterfall” paintings remain a lasting proposition: that meaning can be made not only through mastery, but through the courage to let the world - and the laws of physics - speak back.

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