Pat Steir by Emiliano Granado for The New York Times and Mirage III 2022, Sculpture Milwaukee
Pat Steir
(1938 – 2026)
Last summer Pat Steir, the internationally-acclaimed painter of immersive abstract waterfalls, made a working visit to Landcraft Garden Foundation with the artist Ugo Rondinone and Landcraft co-founder and President Dennis Schrader. Rondinone is the curator of Landcraft’s Sculpture in the Garden program. As the artist to be featured for the program’s 2026 season, Steir had come to select sites for a rare turn to outdoor painting as sculpture.
Steir has been called one of the great innovators of contemporary art, in part because of the paintings invoking waterfalls, which she created by pouring and flinging paint from a ladder so that nature and chance became her collaborators. She reimagined abstraction, conceptualism, landscape, and Eastern art and philosophy. At Landcraft on that first visit, she was challenged and excited by the project. She determined to make acrylic paintings on scrims which would interact with the foliage and the light so that it would seem as though waterfalls were cascading throughout the garden. She once said of this outdoor work, which she made so seldom, “It’s there and it’s not there. It’s just illusion and just paint as presence. It’s about perception versus reality, or as reality.”
Pat planned to return to the garden in early spring to finalize the installation, but then she passed away on March 25, at the age of 87. It is with great sadness that Curator Ugo Rondinone and Landcraft’s Art Committee have decided to pause Sculpture in the Garden’s sixth season. The program will resume in 2027. Landcraft Garden Foundation and the Art Committee send their sincere condolences to Steir’s family and wide circle of friends and art world admirers.
Previous artist participants in Sculpture in the Garden have been Sarah Sze, Jorge Pardo, Virginia Overton, Sam Moyer & Eddie Martinez, and Ned Smyth.
ABOUT SCULPTURE IN THE GARDEN
A hidden gem on the North Fork of Long Island, The Garden at Landcraft Garden Foundation offers four acres of botanical wonder surrounded by nearly ten acres of natural land, open to the public, Fridays and Saturdays between 10 am – 4 pm, May 1st to October 31st. Landcraft Gardens’ Sculpture in the Garden series features artists with international reputations who have a strong connection to the North Fork and its unique topography and history, which has attracted artists to the area since the 19th century. Past exhibitions have been curated by the internationally celebrated artist Ugo Rondinone.
Ugo Rondinone by Piotr Redlinski for the New York Times
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 1997, where he lives and works to this day, in addition to the North Fork. His work has been the subject of recent solo presentations in Belvedere, Vienna (2021), Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022), Petit Palais, Paris (2022), Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, Venice (2022), The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, (2023), Storm King, New York (2023), The Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2023), and Museum SAN, Wonju (2024). In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Last year exhibitions were held of his work at The Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland and the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado. Rondinone lives in New York City and the North Fork of Long Island.