Volume Gallery is delighted to announce I DO, a solo exhibition by renowned multi-disciplinary artist Barbara Stauffacher Solomon opening March 3, 2023, from 5-8pm at 1709 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60622. A continuation of Solomon’s focus on works on paper assembled as intentional bodies of work into books, I DO is comprised of eighty-five 8.5 x 11 works on paper crafted with Solomon’s quintessential use of wordplay and graphic invention.
Best known for her bold wall-painted Supergraphics of the 1960s, Solomon’s signature aesthetic uses black and vermillion line, shape, and sans-serif typography at architectural scale and in her inventive works on paper.
Intended and realized as both an exhibition and a book, I DO began with Solomon’s interest in playing with letter forms. Throughout the drawings she uses iteration, allowing the letters of phrases like “I DO,” “I DO U,” and “I DO C U” to break down and be rearranged. The book’s materiality comes through in painterly question marks, tangible edges of collaged sections of text, and scribbles of Wite-Out. Each page has a hand-drawn grid as a background. Instead of erasing this compositional foundation, Solomon leaves it to give a glimpse of the underlying structure. When installed together, the sequence of pieces reveals where she has expanded letters and punctuation across pages, letting ideas extend across the installation.
As in many of her books, Solomon’s autobiography finds its way into the work. On one page, she mentions her two marriages. She uses the theme of marriage and its declarative commitment, “I DO,” as a catalyst to play with the structure of the italic sans-serif typeface, the meaningful words evolving into abstraction. As Solomon says, her interest was in the letter forms, “and what people read into it is their own problem, you know?”
I DO will be on view at Volume Gallery through April 22, 2023.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b. 1928) is widely recognized as an originator of California Cool. Her unique visual sensibility combined with her Swiss design training is exemplified by one of her first jobs – the logo and wall paintings at Sea Ranch, a unique planned community on the California coast north of the Bay Area.
The San Francisco-based artist worked as a dancer before studying painting and sculpture. After the death of her husband in 1956, she moved to Basel, Switzerland with her young daughter to study graphic design at The Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) with acclaimed designer Armin Hofmann. Profoundly influenced by Hofmann’s teachings, she returned to San Francisco and established her own office in 1962, bringing the Swiss Style to California.
Over the course of her life, Solomon has practiced as a designer, landscape architect, and writer and has taught at Harvard, Yale, San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley. Solomon has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, the Palm Springs Museum of Art, Palm Springs, CA, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL.
