Song

About the work

Since the 1970s, Pat Steir has created more than 50 wall drawings in museums, galleries, cultural institutions, and residences around the world. Specially commissioned for Manuela, ‘Song’ (2024) is Steir’s most recent site-specific wall drawing.

Made with aquacryl paint, colored pencil, and matte varnish applied directly to the wall, ‘Song’ spans 3m x 7.5m in Manuela’s private dining room. Composed of green, carmine, mauve, and raspberry pink brushstrokes that curve, arc, and swerve across a light-yellow background, the energetic marks punctuate a hand-drawn grid, evoking notes in a musical score. “I imagine how the rhythm of the brushstrokes may move in conjunction with the people moving through the space,” Steir says. The streams of paint recall the artist’s now iconic ‘Waterfall’ paintings, which she began in the late 1980s in a studio located on Wooster Street just a few blocks away from Manuela.

Steir took into consideration the location and atmosphere when she made ‘Song’. She says, “It is a serious work of art, but it’s also decoration. I did this musical piece because it would be nice to eat your food and look at.”

About the artist

Pat Steir (b. 1938) first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall series, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s storied five-decade career continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation.

Image courtesy of Pat Steir and Hauser & Wirth