A collection of engrossing sketches created by the late architect Stanley Tigerman are currently on view at Chicago's Volume Gallery. The exhibition, titled Tigerman Rides Again, presents some of the final creative works produced by the iconoclastic architect who passed away in June of 2019. 

According to exhibition text, "After a hiatus from his daily drawing practice, Stanley Tigerman picked up his pen and his moleskin notebook in January 2019. He began creating images that harkened back to his early paintings and moved away from the drawings he made to express, explore, and develop ideas on architecture throughout his over five decade-long practice. While he is known for his lively and often colorful collages of buildings and cartoons, these black and white drawings revert to another time. The works produce optical illusions and align with his paintings from the 60’s that reveal influences of his former Yale professor, Josef Albers."

The drawings, a subtly changing array of distorted grids that ebb and flow across the page to create vertigo-like hallucinations, gesture toward seemingly impossible geometries that obliterate any sense of rigid order gridded forms might otherwise represent. The effort culminates a life-long fascination with imbuing formal systems with a generative potential through the addition of visual and conceptual tension. 

The exhibition text continues: [Tigerman's] "work embedded references to history and religion in both his daily practice of drawing and his physical buildings. Mies van der Rohe remained one of Tigerman’s greatest inspirations as he continued to create buildings in reaction to the rigid principles of modernism." 

"These recent drawings express a different perspective as they create unknown and fluid planes and break from his typical conventions and his heavy reliance on symmetry. Ultimately, the concept of symmetry embraces Tigerman as it poignantly marks the end of his life at the symmetrical age of 88 years old."

The exhibition is on view through November 2nd.