For Basel Social Club, von Bartha is participating with Alas, Her Pink Ass Asked for Grass, 2021, a functioning ping-pong table by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. The artwork is intended to be used and can serve as an “icebreaker” to get people who may not yet know each other involved in a game. Ping Pong is universal, and so is the aesthetic language of the US-american artist, who deals a lot with nature, parks, architecture, and urbanity in her work. Themes that are particularly emphasized in this year‘s edition of Basel Social Club by the chosen location.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b. 1928, USA) is an American artist and graphic designer. She worked as a ballet dancer as well as studying painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1956, Stauffacher Solomon moved from San Francisco to Basel in search of her own utopia, with the ambition of earning a living as a graphic designer. In Basel, she attended the Kunstgewerbeschule, studying under the legendary graphic designer Armin Hofmann, whose design principles continue to influence her practice today (von Bartha founders, Margareta and Miklos von Bartha, also studied under Hofmann). The design she encountered was modernist, and in 1962, she returned to the United States, bringing with her this approach to design and opening her own studio on Montgomery Street, San Francisco.

In the 1990s, when Barbara Stauffacher Solomon participated in a group exhibition Visionary San Francisco, she made a series of 12 Ping Pong paintings titled This Is Not A Ping Pong Table (1990), the size of ping pong tables, using the table’s green rectangle to evoke the form of parks, gardens, parking lots and public squares. Critics declared her contribution one of the best architectural responses on the “dialectic between the street grid of San Francisco and the concept of play between the idea of urbanity and the arcadia that it has always represented.”

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, born 1928 in San Francisco, California, USA, lives and works in San Francisco.

Location: Restaurant Predigerhof, Predigerhofstrasse 172, 4153 Reinach
Dates: June 9 – 6, 2024, daily from 11am until 11pm