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	Artist Profiles


	April / Pat Steir - Cosmic Abstraction


	Pat Steir has been exhibiting her paintings since the early 60s and has been included in numerous shows ever since (as evidenced by her mile-long exhibition resume). Her work is represented in several public collections throughout the world including all the major New York museums: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has also received a number of distinguished awards including, a N.E.A Grant for Art in Public Institutions (1976), a Guggenheim grant (1981), and she was honored by the American Woman's Economic Development Corporation with their Salute to Women in the Business of Art, sponsored by Avon and ARTnews in 1992.


	Two things collide in these paintings: the austere esthetic embodied by the (mostly) severe colors and reductive forms, and, the small bits of wildly expressive gestural paint. In a way they encapsulate, at a very primary level, the experience an Ingmar Bergman film provides. As objects they are like Bergman�s characters; personas of sup- pressed dark secret feelings that are nevertheless unable to completely shroud intense and explosive emotions. Because of this these paintings are imbued with a peculiar variety of understated surrealism that is as reductive as it is sensual.


		Summer Pond, 2000-02, oil on canvas, 122 x 85.5 in

	Begin with the subject matter which immediately suggests a relationship to landscape. �Landscape� doesn�t quite fit though, at least not in the traditional understanding of it. Steir�s landscapes reference such generalized entities as bodies of water, skies and the cosmos. One painting,



			Bay of Mumbai, 2001-02, oil on canvas, 96 x 96 in

	Mountain, at first suggests a portion of a Maxfield Parrish painting. But then there is that schpritz of red paint near the bottom. Just as you are about to fly off into the realm of imagination the artist spoils the experience a bit by anchoring you to earth with that quick, small gesture. Now look at the paintings Summer Pond and Bay of Mumbai with their elegantly beautiful surfaces. You gaze


			Mountain,1998-99, oil on canvas, 108 x 108 in

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	^{All Images are Copyright 2003 of the individual artists / text Copyright 2003, Abstract Art Online. All rights reserved.}


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