The Virgin's Dream

Pat Steirs The Virgins Dream from 1972 is an oil and pencil painting on canvas that represents an early phase in the artists career, when she was exploring the relationship between painting and drawing, representation and abstraction, and the sacred and the secular that would define her work for the next five decades. The Virgins Dream, with its title suggesting both the Christian narrative of the Annunciation and the secular experience of dreaming, combines representational imagery with abstract mark-making in a way that refuses the viewer the comfort of a single interpretation. Steir, who was working in New York in the early 1970s alongside the Conceptual artists and Process artists who were challenging the conventions of painting, developed an approach to the medium that incorporated drawing, writing, and printed marks into the painted surface, creating works that exist on the border between painting and other media. The oil and pencil medium, in which the gestural marks of oil paint are supplemented by the Linear precision of pencil drawing, creates a surface that combines the chromatic richness of painting with the graphic clarity of drawing, reflecting Steirs refusal to accept the conventional boundaries between mediums. The year 1972 places this painting in the period when Steir was establishing the conceptual framework that would lead to her later waterfall paintings, and The Virgins Dream can be seen as an early exploration of the relationship between the physical process of painting and the imaginative content that gives it meaning.

Steirs paintings of the early 1970s are important documents of the development of Process painting and Conceptual art in New York, and The Virgins Dream demonstrates the combination of painting, drawing, and conceptual thinking that would define her career. The painting influenced the development of mixed-media painting and the broader tradition of art that challenges the boundaries between mediums.

A 1972 oil and pencil painting by Steir combining representational imagery with abstract mark-making in a work titled after the Christian narrative of the Virgins Dream, exploring the relationship between painting and drawing and the sacred and secular at the border of Process art.