Anthony Meier is pleased to present Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Garden = Grid = City, opening January 15, 2026. Marking the gallery’s first presentation of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (1928–2024), the exhibition highlights the vision of an artist who spent more than eight decades transforming the way we see landscape, architecture, and art.
Through Stauffacher Solomon’s singular lens, city grids, gardens, and green rectangles—whether in California, San Francisco, or distant and imagined landscapes—become sites of structured imagination. Across time and place, her drawings explore the human impulse to impose order, create paradise, and translate myth into enduring poetic forms.
I produce drawings that stand in an ambiguous position between landscape, architecture, and art.
- Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Harvard Graduate School of Design lecture, 1986
Garden = Grid = City highlights Stauffacher Solomon’s Green Architecture series and her lifelong fascination with the green rectangle as a symbol of paradise. In her 1989 book “Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden”—based on her UC Berkeley thesis and published by Rizzoli—she described California as a constructed Eden, where “yellow deserts were watered, and the green gardens grew,” and where San Francisco’s grid carved controlled green spaces into natural hills and sand. Her drawings turn these ideas into an accessible visual language, showing how design shapes our experience of nature and how people try—again and again—to build their own version of paradise.
Featuring rarely exhibited works on paper, paintings, as well as a Supergraphic, this exhibition illuminates how Stauffacher Solomon’s enduring philosophy of landscape threaded through every aspect of her practice, from architectural logic to abstraction and color, producing a visual language of rhythm, scale, and imagination, while reflecting the fragility and ecological stakes of shaping these paradises in a land of impermanent water.
Extending beyond the canvas and page, the artist brought the lessons of her Green Architecture series into large-scale interventions that blurred art, architecture, and landscape. At The Sea Ranch in 1964, she applied color, symbols, and abstract forms directly onto buildings and walls, transforming architectural surfaces into dynamic, site-specific artworks. As the inventor of Supergraphics, she challenged the prevailing modernist ethos to separate art from history, context, and lived experience, instead weaving memory, myth, and the logic of landscape back into her work.
This lineage continues in the gallery exhibition, from the newly installed large-scale Supergraphic in the gallery library, which animates the space with her characteristic rhythm, scale, and color, to the Ping Pong Table paintings, where scaled-up leisure objects and green rectangles transform play, landscape, and architecture into abstract meditations. Together with her Green Architecture drawings, these works reveal a lifelong investigation of structure, imagination, and the human impulse to organize and reimagine the world—a vision at once formally rigorous and profoundly poetic.
Garden = Grid = City celebrates Stauffacher Solomon’s singular contribution to contemporary culture, revealing an artist whose work turns the landscape into a living canvas where imagination, order, and myth converge.
San Francisco is a gridded city in the wild west. Straight lines of streets were drawn over pieces of white paper and then over the white sand and golden hills, relentlessly. From the port to the Pacific and from the Bay to the backdrop of the hills, selected rectangles in the grid were colored green.
– Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, SCIArch lecture, 1992
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog titled California Cool, Swiss Precision, featuring a previously unpublished 2019 Q&A between Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator, critic, art historian, and Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.