Pat Steir

Pat Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck on April 10, 1938, in Newark, New Jersey. She studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1956 to 1958, then at the Boston University College of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1960, before returning to Pratt to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962. At Pratt she studied under Philip Guston and Richard Lindner, and she developed a lifelong friendship with fellow student Sol LeWitt, with whom she later co-founded the artists' publication and distribution nonprofit Printed Matter. She was also a founding board member of the feminist art journal Heresies.

Steir showed in group exhibitions at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1963, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1964, and the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, early recognition for a woman artist in a field then dominated by men. She spent the 1970s and early 1980s working as an illustrator and art director in New York and teaching at Parsons School of Design and the California Institute of the Arts, while showing in the Whitney Biennial in 1973, 1977, 1983, and 1991. Her circle of close artistic influences during this period included Sol LeWitt, the composer John Cage, whom she met around 1980, and the painter Agnes Martin, whom Steir first visited in New Mexico in 1971 and continued to see for more than thirty years until Martin's death in 2004. From Cage in particular, Steir has said she learned to embrace chance as a working method.

A first trip to Asia in the early 1980s reshaped her practice: she became absorbed in Japanese woodcuts and Chinese literati and Shan shui landscape painting. Her Wave paintings of 1985 and 1986, made by flinging paint-loaded brushes at the canvas, marked her shift away from controlled brushwork. By 1988 that experimentation matured into the Waterfall paintings that would define her career, made by pouring and dripping thinned paint down a vertical canvas so that gravity, not the artist's hand alone, determined much of the final image. She described the method plainly: the paint makes the picture, and gravity makes the image. Steir had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in 1984, the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2011, the Barnes Foundation and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2019, and the first survey of her work in China at the Long Museum in Shanghai in 2021. She joined Levy Gorvy (now Levy Gorvy Dayan) in 2017 and added representation by Hauser and Wirth in 2022, debuting with the gallery that November in Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls, her first New York solo show since 2017, which featured Blue River, the largest single canvas of her career. She received the State Department's International Medal of Arts in 2017 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. Steir died of natural causes on March 25, 2026, in Manhattan, at age 87. She was continuing to paint up to her death. In the months after, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, announced plans to include her in its 2026 to 2027 group exhibition on Abstract Expressionism on the East End and to mount a focused retrospective of her work in the summer of 2027.

Critics recognized Steir as a foundational figure in postwar American abstraction, notable both for her technical innovation and for being among the first women to achieve sustained prominence in a New York art world dominated by men. Her obituaries in Frieze and ARTnews framed the Waterfall paintings as a genuine redefinition of what painting could be: not an act of pure authorial intention, but a collaboration between artist, material, and gravity. Her association with Sol LeWitt, John Cage, and Agnes Martin placed her at the intersection of Minimalism and Conceptual art even as her own paintings remained rooted in a painterly, process-based abstraction distinct from both movements. Museums recognized this standing well before her market did: the Hirshhorn's 2019 survey, Color Wheel, and the Barnes Foundation exhibition the same year cemented her institutional reputation, and the 2021 Long Museum survey extended that recognition internationally.

Steir's market shifted decisively after 2017, when her move to Levy Gorvy brought expanded gallery reach and renewed curatorial interest; her auction record was broken three times that year alone. Every one of her top ten auction results has come since 2017, and all ten are Waterfall paintings, six of them in her most recognizable white-on-black palette. Her auction high is Elective Affinity Waterfall (1992), which sold for 2,295,000 dollars at Phillips New York on May 17, 2018. Her second and third-highest results are Paris Waterfall (1990), which sold for 1,381,000 dollars at Sotheby's New York on November 17, 2022, and Waterfall of the Asian Night (1990), which sold for 1,048,500 dollars at Sotheby's New York on November 18, 2021. Auction volume has been comparatively modest in recent years, and her death in March 2026 has prompted renewed institutional and market attention, including museum tributes announced by the Parrish Art Museum and Museum Voorlinden in the months that followed.

Steir's market re-rated substantially after 2017, and every one of her ten highest auction results, all from the Waterfall series, has come in the years since. Her recent death in March 2026 makes this an active period for reassessment of her market, with museum tributes and survey exhibitions announced within months of her passing and no catalogue raisonne yet published to anchor scholarship and authentication. Buyers should expect continued attention to her white-on-black Waterfall works specifically, since they account for the majority of her strongest auction results, and should rely on her representing galleries and the artist's estate for verification given the absence of a catalogue raisonne.