July 2024.
| Nellie King Solomon | |
| Birth Place: | San Francisco, California, US |
| Parents: | Barbara Stauffacher Solomon |
Nellie King Solomon (born 1971) is an American contemporary painter best known for her large-scale abstract gestural paintings on Mylar. Her work explores ideas of space, environment, control, loss of control, materials, and movement.[1] [2] It is said she makes "beautiful pictures of terrible things."[3]
Solomon paints her abstract works by sometimes pouring and often times pushing paint, inks, and other materials, sometimes toxic, such as asphalt and soda ash[4] over translucent Mylar using custom tools.
Solomon's art practice straddles several different art movements while being wholly contemporary, including the Light and Space movement, Finish Fetish movement, and color field painting.
Nellie King Solomon was born in 1971 in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, California to two prominent San Francisco residents; architect Daniel Solomon and artist and designer Barbara "Bobbie" Stauffacher Solomon, creator of Supergraphics. Her family has extensive roots in the California creative community. In an interview with The Project for Women, Solomon says "I come from a family of designers, authors, tv writers, hat makers, pianists and shrinks. In short, generations of Californian creative professionals who made their livings off their wits and taste."[5]
Although the child of notable individuals, her youth was full of challenging experiences.[6] Solomon struggled to keep up in French school later being diagnosed as dyslexic. Also in her youth, Solomon spent years training in ballet, but struggled in her training when issues with her feet forced her to cease her practice.
For high school, Solomon attended the Urban School in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. While in school Solomon decided to follow in her father's footsteps and become involved with architecture, choosing to work on an architectural restoration project in Venice, Italy. Also during her high school years Solomon worked as an artist assistant to David Ireland.
For undergraduate university studies, Solomon was accepted into the highly competitive Cooper Union’s School of Architecture in New York City. Following her departure from Cooper Union, Solomon took a gap year studying and travelling. She spent time studying and working in sustainable development and agriculture in Santa Cruz. She lived in New York, Paris, and Barcelona before ultimately deciding to return to California to study art.[7]
Upon her return to California, Solomon completed a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received her Masters in Fine Art at the California College of the Arts. Solomon was a professor of art at Stanford University and California College of the Arts.[8]
In 2001, then recently out of grad school, Solomon had her first solo show which garnered critical praise even from the hard-to-please SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker. His glowing critique of her first show also laid down a challenge: "Her show is a powerful debut that will be hard for her to follow" said Baker. Solomon laughed at his challenge and decided to face it head on.
Since her first solo exhibition, Solomon's work has continued to evolve to meet Baker's challenge. Her work is said to encompass both the micro and macro – sometimes in complete abstraction and at other times with narrative visuals incorporated into them. In a review by David M. Roth, Roth says "it’s impossible to say whether you’re seeing a magnified view of a molecular reaction or a vision of the Earth's crust from outer space" and in that sense sees her work as closely related to the photographs of Edward Burtynsky and David Maisel.
In either case, critics have placed Solomon's work firmly in the art canon of abstract painting. Roth provides further context by indicating her work has elements of "the free-form splatter of Jackson Pollock, the staining of Helen Frankenthaler, the gravity-based dripping of Pat Steir, the hybrid smearing techniques invented by Ed Moses and the gritty surfaces of early Sam Francis."
Separately, art critic Kenneth Baker agrees and places her work firmly among the paintings of Sam Francis, Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler and further believes that Solomon's narrow strip series, "recall the marks left by melting ice in Andy Goldsworthy's icicle drawings."[9]
Although Solomon's work shares elements with modernist abstract painters, she is also actively rebelling against them. In a published catalog for an exhibition with Ochi Projects, her work is described as "engaging with the history of painting in a challenging and combative style."[10] Solomon provides further context for her work stating "because I grew up in architecture ...that sort of high modernism [is something] I both play off of and rebel against."[11] Further insight into her work is illustrated in an interview with The Project for Women, Solomon says "My work is like reaching into a dark velvet bag and pulling out everything you’re not suppose to talk about."
Solomon's work has been featured in the Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Hyperallergic, Wallpaper, Harvard Review, Zyzzyva, Art in America, San Francisco Examiner, Art Practical, ArtBlitzLA, NYTheatre, and Architectural Digest, among other publications.
In 2019, Solomon moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles.[12]
In 2024, Solomon held a survey show in her hometown of San Francisco of works created between 1999 and 2024. Critic David M. Roth writes that the show combined several elements of influence including race car driving (taught to her by her father), her early experimentation in materials, the works of her mother, the late Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, and responses to moving to and living in Los Angeles, among others.
Solomon makes her paintings on a substrate of Mylar which is heavily used in architectural drawing[13] and comes directly out of her training as an architect.[14] It is her training in architecture that Solomon credits to her "truth in materials" adage where she uses custom made glass and dowel tools to either stamp or spread pigments across her mylar surfaces.[15]
Solomon credits the physical process of painting large scale works to her surfing practice and prior training in ballet. "My growing up as a ballet dancer very much affects the way I hop around spaces and crawl over my table and push and pull the paint. I’m very physical with it,"
Her paintings often incorporate bold colors which art critic Kenneth Baker believes "yield[s] something that eludes most painters working in this vein: the sense of color displaying itself."[16]
Although straddling several movements including Light and Space movement, Finish Fetish Movement, and Color field Painting, her work does not fit comfortably into any single movement.
Nellie King Solomon collaborates with her mother, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, often acting as both installation facilitator, creator and career manager. The two have had numerous exhibitions together, maintain similar influences, but remain distinct in their approaches to art making.[17]
Their similarities include both being trained in architecture, although neither were ever licensed. They both create rules and grids and then challenge them.[18] They both rely on Cartesian coordinates, but with very different purposes.
Although both artists share similar influences, Nellie King Solomon, often rebels from the hard-edged Swiss graphic design and modernist work of her mother.
In a review by Pacific Sun Newspaper for their show SUPER-SILLY-US, writer Owen explains "Solomon’s work is abstract and irreverent, and has a kind of relationship to movement and the body. Bobbie’s work is really informed by her meticulous training in Swiss graphic design with set rules behind it. That said, they were both trained as architects, and it’s interesting to see how each of them has taken that interest and translated it in very different ways through visual art."[19]
Among others, Solomon has had exhibitions at
Group exhibitions have featured her work at
Solomon has been nominated for the SECA award multiple times. The SECA Art Award distinguishes Bay Area artists whose work, at the time of nomination, has not received substantial recognition from a major institution.[20]