EASTON, MD.- The Academy Art Museum ’s new exhibition, “Pat Steir: A View,” will be on display August 4 through October 14, 2012 in Easton , MD. Steir, a major figure in American art since the 1970s, has created some of the most ambitious and challenging paintings, drawings and prints of the last four decades. She is a draftsman of words, letters, signs and symbolic marks, drips and spills applied to paper and canvas. Steir was born in 1940 in Newark , NJ , and currently lives in New York City . She is known to many as a conceptual artist, in which the concepts or ideas involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

Academy Art Museum Curator Anke Van Wagenberg explains, that the exhibition “Pat Steir: A View” offers the viewer close to 30 works created over a period of 40 years and includes drawings, prints and a very large painting by Steir. She comments about the Museum’s exhibition, “We focused on Steir’s exploration of the vocabulary of drawing. Steir's early efforts explode into ravishing beauty. Works from the 1970s contain basic elements of art — scribbles and scrawls, ruled lines and curves.” She adds, “In various conversations when I visited Steir’s New York studio, she emphasized the importance of drawings, which she calls “the soldiers of my work.”

The Museum’s show culminates with Valentine, a painting of magnificent proportions (10’ 7” x 9’ 1¼”). The vibrant painting, while minimalist in composition, viscerally pops off the canvas. The colors and composition are carefully selected and controlled; the final outcome is subject to gravity, letting the paint make its own moves. Steir’s latest work involves consideration of materials as well as ideas. Steir explains, “I let the idea control the material, but the idea and the material are one, the material is half the idea.”

The exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Simone Friedman Rones and the Friedman-French Foundation; Mary Beth Cahill and Steve Champlin. The Academy Art Museum exhibitions are also sponsored by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Talbot County Arts Council. Curator-led tours of the Pat Steir exhibition will be held on Wednesday, September 19 at 11 a.m. and Friday, October 12 at 1 p.m.