Wish # 2-Breadfruit

Pat Steirs Wish # 2-Breadfruit from 1974 is a color lithograph on ivory wove paper that belongs to the artists series of Wish drawings, in which she explored the relationship between representation and abstraction through the device of a single graphic mark that simultaneously suggests a specific object and functions as a purely abstract shape. The breadfruit of the title, a tropical fruit with a distinctive bumpy surface, provides Steir with a natural form that can be rendered as a recognizable object or reduced to a pattern of marks that exists on the border between figuration and abstraction, and the lithographic medium allows her to explore this ambiguity through the multiple layers and color variations that are characteristic of printmaking. Steir, who would later become known for her waterfall paintings in which thin streams of paint pour down the canvas under the influence of gravity, developed in the Wish series the conceptual framework that would inform her entire career: the idea that a painting or print can be simultaneously a representation of something in the world and a record of the physical process that produced it. The year 1974 places this lithograph in the period when Steir was establishing her reputation in the New York art world, working alongside the Conceptual artists and Process artists who were expanding the definition of what a work of art could be. The color lithograph medium, with its capacity for precise registration and chromatic richness, allows Steir to create the layered color effects that give the breadfruit form its visual complexity while maintaining the conceptual clarity of the single mark.

Steirs Wish series is an important contribution to the development of Conceptual and Process art in the 1970s, and Wish # 2-Breadfruit demonstrates the conceptual framework that would inform her entire career. The series influenced the development of printmaking as a medium for conceptual investigation.

A 1974 color lithograph by Steir from the Wish series exploring the ambiguity between representation and abstraction through the graphic mark of a breadfruit, establishing the conceptual framework of simultaneous object and process that would define her career.