Pat Steir: Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls

By Amanda Millet-Sorsa

DEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen

With Blue River and Rainbow Waterfalls, Pat Steir has transformed Hauser & Wirth’s immense ground floor gallery in Chelsea into an arena for transcendence. We are lifted away by the gravitational pull of her monumental canvases, each awash with mesmerizing color and the movement of paint. Steir has been developing her mature work since the early 1990s, and her paintings today continue to command respect—and even awe—from their viewers. In her current exhibition, there are three bodies of work in which we are confronted with the sublime, each drawing us into its expansive space.

Al río / To the River

By Zoe Leonard

SEPT 2022 | Critics Page

For the last six years, Zoe Leonard has been making photographs along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, particularly the many miles where the river is used to demarcate the border between the US and Mexico. The work is informed by the artist’s deep consideration of the river as a natural entity, and the human constructions engineered to control the movement of water, people, and commerce. The result of this durational engagement is a large-scale work, the first part of which is printed here: a series of eight close-ups of the river surface that expose and amplify the shifting tensions in the water's surface.

Francine Tint: Life in Action

By David Ebony

NOV 2022 | ArtSeen

Mostly large canvases (up to 6 by 10 feet) painted within the past three years, in the midst of the pandemic, the works on view in Francine Tint: Life in Action appear as luminous and effervescent as any she has made. But within the parameters of the visual vocabulary she has established over decades, Tint reveals a highly nuanced range of emotional states—from exuberantly euphoric to introspectively pensive.

Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River

By Jennie Waldow

MAY 2022 | Art Books

The publication’s release coincides with Leonard’s 2022 exhibition of the series at Mudam Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, but it stands alone as a unique, multi-voiced analysis of the US-Mexico border, thanks to its intelligent and thoughtful two-volume format. The images and texts are richly complementary, together forming a complex portrait of the river as both physical and symbolic terrain.