2025 Poster Session

Bruce Goff (1904–1982), best known for his long career as an architect during which he designed over 500 buildings, also maintained a prolific painting practice. In works he referred to simply as "compositions," Goff worked through ideas, experimenting with form, texture and color free from the constraints of physics and structural integrity. More than 400 of these painted works are in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection along with archival materials, photographs, material samples and ephemera. Known for his eccentric and varied architectural practice that incorporated unique materials such as glass cullet, feathers and purple stucco, the artist had a similarly broad interest in materiality in his painted works. While his architecture has been studied to some extent, his paintings have never been technically examined. This study aims to examine how Goff made his compositions, and how his techniques came from or were carried into his architectural renderings.




Goff's only formal art instruction occurred while he was in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after which he learned primarily by observation and experimentation, applying what he gleaned from books and in the making of architectural drawings. His early watercolors, both figurative and abstract, are relatively traditional in their execution: translucent planes of color on various thicknesses of artist papers. Looking for new opportunities on the heels of the Great Depression, Goff moved to Chicago in 1933 to work with sculptor Alfonso Ianelli and by 1935 was the Director of the Design Department for Vitrolite Glass, makers of the large curved, solid-colored glass panels often associated with Art Deco architecture, and teaching part time at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Goff's time in Chicago proved to be transformative, marking a major shift in the materials and techniques of his compositions. He traded hand-painted backgrounds on pale, lightly textured papers for larger, commercially colored supports like construction paper and daylight fluorescent cardboard. As he shifted to primarily opaque watercolor, Goff's painted works from the mid 30s onward feature media applied by various types of spray, shapes from found-object stencils, foil star stickers and a resin that dried in crystalline patterns. His more elaborate architectural renderings also feature similar speckled textures, collage elements and stenciling. By diluting, pouring, spraying, wiping and blowing his paints, Goff became a master manipulator of his chosen media. In preparation for the 2025 exhibition Bruce Goff: Material Worlds in which over 30 of these works will be displayed—many for the first time—this collaborative study highlights his skilled, chance, and unique working methods across a wide body of work.