Steiger gets Maximum Impact from Minimalist Landscapes
Selective viewing is essential to sanity. The human brain can only process so much information at once, and those whose brains don't shuffle, edit and erase most of what they see and hear go mad. Order makes understanding possible.
On the opposite end of this spectrum of perception is painter William Steiger, the owner of an orderly eye if ever there were one, who selects only the most pleasing and succinct details from a tacky and complicated American landscape and paints those in flat color and high relief against otherwise blazingly blank backgrounds of whiteness.
Cable cars hang in mid-air, held up by the thinnest of wires. Watertowers—those lighthouses of the prairies, skyscrapers of the great plains—stand stark against blank white skies. Rollercoasters, Ferris wheels, railroad bridges, tunnels: These are Steiger's humble icons of perfection. A train caboose is reduced to an abstract pileup of geometric shapes in red, black and gray. The apparently sun-bleached walls of a grain elevator disappear in the whiteness of the background.
The effect of this minimalizing technique is almost musical, the isolated objects look the way a few notes sound when they are surrounded by silence. The white acts as a pause that allows us to “hear” the thing because Steiger has eliminated so much environmental detail. Fashioned with the same attention to precision that designers gave to the machines and buildings that inspired Steiger in the first place, each painting is a perfect invention.
Together, the body of work seems like an homage to the mathematics of engineering, with each object illuminated by a cleansing, almost blinding light and without a trace of human presence or sentiment.
Steiger's work approaches abstraction in places and there is a sense here that if a few more edges were removed, the literal meanings of these paintings would dissolve into planes of flat color. It is Steiger's genius, though, that they don't have to lose their literalness to keep our attention.
Steiger has set the ideas in his paintings in motion and then he steps back to admire his craft and to watch them work. Refreshingly, there is no sense of heated artistic ego or creative chaos here. Just the opposite—Steiger makes paintings that instill a cool sense of order. (Margaret Hawkins)
William Steiger at Margaret Thatcher
By reducing landscape to simplified forms, New York-based William Steiger creates stark, cool paintings of often-archetypal subject matter. The 11 works (all 2004) in this show depict cable cars, grain elevators, a mill, an aerial landscape or the Coney Island Wonder Wheel—all curiously devoid of human presence. Apart from the legendary amusement park attraction, Steiger provides no reference to a particular locale, time of day or era.
The hard-edge, flat quality of his paint handling is fitting for the mostly architectural forms. Although rendered freehand, the edges are crisp and precise. Color is often more arbitrary than perceptual. In “Blue Mill” (60 by 48 inches), for example, the windows of the all-white edifice are an electric cerulean blue. Steiger's earlier paintings also depict man-made objects—a bridge, a lighthouse, an airplane or signal towers—within a nonspecific landscape, yet, unlike his new work, they do not rely heavily on negative space. In his recent pieces, the untouched gessoed ground is as much part of the image as are the precise shapes painted in oil. In “Elevator V” ( 60 by 48 inches), a row of grain elevators recedes in one-point perspective. The sides of the buildings that are in shadow are rendered in subtly varied values of dove gray; the sunlit areas remain the untouched white of the gessoed ground. Although the image reads correctly, the viewer is left to differentiate where the buildings end and the sky begins.
In a series of paintings of cable cars, ranging from 10 by 8 to 60 by 48 inches, either one or two intense red cars are suspended on cables that enter the composition at one edge and tilt downward, then off the canvas and out of sight. The background is either white gesso or blue “sky,” with no suggestion of where the cars might have originated or where they might be headed. The viewer is invited to imagine what occurs in the space outside of the canvas.
At his best, Steiger plays visual games with the viewer. “The Ride” (60 by 48 inches) is a green and ocher rendering of the Wonder Wheel. Designed by Charles Herman and constructed in 1918-20, the Ferris Wheel-like ride consists of eight stationary cars and 16 others that roll along interior tracks. At first glance, Steiger's painting appears to boast draftsmanlike accuracy, yet upon closer inspection, discrepancies are revealed. The lines delineating the wheel seem to become entangled or follow illogical paths, and the tracks appear to turn back on themselves. Here as elsewhere, Steiger revels both in verisimilitude and in pointing out the inherent artificiality of visual language. (Melissa Kuntz)
First Impression – The Two-Color Miracle, A New Etching by William Steiger
William Steiger is a painter with a hands-on approach to printmaking. For his recent etching, “The Mill” (2004), he established strict technical limitations for himself: the full-color etching was to be printed using only two colors—vemillion and blue, from only two plates. Working closely with Kathy Kuehn and the other printers at Pace Editions, Steiger used a combination or soft-ground etching and aquatint. He established the image's basic combination with the etching, then used a stepped acquatint process to create the solid areas of color. Isolated parts of the plate were etched for different lengths of time so that when the two plates were printed on top of one another—wet ink on top of wet ink—the colors mixed to create a range of seductive hues, including bright red, orange, various shades of brown, near black, and tones between royal blue and violet.
The technical facts are simple—two colors, two plates—and complement the austerity of the architectural subject: a structure that, in its clarity of form, has a Shaker-like presence. Steiger deliberately left out details in order to emphasize the images's formal qualities. The right edge of the main building, for example, is implied by the relationships between shapes and colors and exists only in the mind of the viewer. It is this penchant for abstraction and sense of color, combined with matter-of-fact technique and subject that lends this print an unexpected magic.
Weekend: Fine Arts
William Steiger, "Signal" Margaret Thatcher Projects, 511 West 25th Street, 212-675-0222 (through Nov. 16th). Updating the Precisionism of Modernists like Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Mr. Steiger creates flattened, hard-edged, high contrast paintings of grain elevators, railroad signals and amusement park rides. They have a fresh material immediacy and a cool nostalgia. The complex linear webs in shades of green or orange describing Ferris wheel-type structures are especially engaging. (Ken Johnson)
Pace Editions, artist portfolio, William Steiger
Dirt Press, Journal of Contemporary Arts & Letters 2006
Art Critical, David Cohen on William Steiger, 2004
Queens Museum of Art, exhibitions, William Steiger, 2002
Dumbo Art Center, press release, 2002
Atlanta Creative Loafing, Point of View—Cathy Byrd, 2002
William Steiger’s Eternal Distance, essay by Maura Robinson, 2002
William Steiger news, April 2008
Exhibition images: Roy Boyd Gallery, Chicago, 2007
Exhibition images and press release: Margaret Thatcher Projects, October 2006
Exhibition images and review: Marcia Wood Gallery, October 2005
Exhibition images and press release: Margaret Thatcher Projects, October 2004
Exhibition images and reviews: Pentimenti Gallery, March 2003
Exhibition images and press release: Margaret Thatcher Projects, October 2002