SUSANA SOLANO

Solano’s work explores the artist’s relationship to space and materials, and she frequently allows evidence of her processes, such as welding or grinding, to remain visible in the finished piece. An article from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation says, “… her work continued to encompass a range of materials typically associated with modernist sculpture, such as iron, steel, lead, glass, and wire mesh. Through her manipulations and juxtapositions of these materials, however, her sculpture developed to become more evocative of structures found in nature or in domestic settings, such as a bridge or a table. She focused on their potential symbolic meanings by creating works that are formally rigorous and imposing in scale and materiality.”

Susana Solano was born in Barcelona, in 1946, where she still lives and works. She studied at the city’s Real acadèmia Catalana de bellas artes de San Jorge. In 1980, she had her first solo exhibition at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and she went on to show at Skulptur Projekte Münster and Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany in 1987, and at the Venice Biennale in 1988. Solano’s first retrospective exhibition was mounted by the Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in 1992. Solano’s first major exhibition in the United States was at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1988), followed by solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, (1989–90), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991). In more recent years, she went on to show at the National Museum of the Prado; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

Solano’s work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, among others.

Jack Shainman Gallery presented Solano’s first solo exhibition, A meitat de camí – Halfway there, in winter (2013-2014). Spanning the past 26 years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition included recent and historical sculptures, photographs, and works on paper.