Biography
Susana Solano is one of the fundamental figures of contemporary Spanish sculpture and a key protagonist of the international renewal of sculpture in the 1980s. Her practice, which extends from sculpture and installation to drawing, photography, video, and jewelry, revolves around a sustained interrogation of space, limit, and the viewer's bodily experience. Her structures of steel, iron, metal mesh, and other industrial materials generate permeable boundaries—open enclosures, traversable cages, symbolic thresholds—in which the void is not absence but an active agent: a space charged with memory, silence, and emotional resonance.
Solano's sculpture engages actively with the Spanish sculptural tradition—from Julio González to Chillida and Oteiza—and with the achievements of North American minimalism and post-minimalism—Serra, Morris, Nauman—while transcending both through a deeply personal voice in which the formal and the symbolic are inseparable. Her works operate as open metaphors of the interaction between body and environment: experience is constructed through displacement and physical perception, in a play of contrasts between void and volume, interior and exterior, limit and opening. The artist herself has noted that her work does not seek to narrate, but to sustain the indecipherable: sculpture as an enigma that requires time, attention, and presence.
Throughout her career, Solano has evolved from the large metal structures of her early decades toward works of smaller scale and greater material heterogeneity, incorporating wood, wax, plastics, wicker, and natural elements, never abandoning her capacity to transform the exhibition space into a territory of shared experience.
Susana Solano graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Barcelona in 1976, where she taught until 1987. Her first sculptural works date from 1979, and her first solo exhibition took place at the Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1980). Her international standing was consolidated rapidly: she participated in Documenta, Kassel (1987 and 1992), the São Paulo Biennale (1987), Skulptur Projekte Münster (1987), and the Venice Biennale (1988 and 1993), sharing the Spanish Pavilion in 1988 with Jorge Oteiza. Among her most notable solo exhibitions are retrospectives at the Palacio de Velázquez of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1992), the MACBA (Barcelona, 1999), the IVAM and the Museo Patio Herreriano (2019–2020), and Anónimos at the Fundació Vila Casas (Barcelona, 2024), curated by Enrique Juncosa. In 2025 she presented Lo que supe y olvido at Halfhouse (Barcelona) and participated in the group exhibition Entre dos patios at the Fundació Joan Miró. Her awards include the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1988), the Tomás Francisco Prieto Prize of the Royal Mint (2011), and the GAC Prize for her artistic career (Barcelona, 2015). Her work is held in collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MoMA, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the MACBA, the IVAM, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the CA2M, the Fundación Helga de Alvear, the Fundación "la Caixa", the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Fundação de Serralves (Porto), S.M.A.K. (Ghent), the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), the Museet for Samtidskunst (Oslo), and the Utsu-Kushi-Ga-Hara Open Air Museum (Tokyo), among others.