Pat Steir is an influential American painter. Best known for her Waterfall series of splashed, dripping pigment on canvas, her work is influenced by Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism, and Taoist philosophy. Steir’s eclectic practice is characterized by an interest in aesthetic degradation, wherein she frequently breaks down her large, washy paintings into semblances of itself. "I wanted to destroy images as symbols,” the artist has said. “To make the image a symbol for a symbol. I had to act it out, make the image, and cross it out. No imagery, but at the same time endless imagery. Every nuance of paint texture worked as an image.” Born in 1938 in Newark, NJ, she received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in...