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TOP EXHIBITIONS OPENING THIS WEEK IN

NEW YORK (NOV. 18-24)

FRIDAY

Susana Solano: “A meitat de camí – Halfway There” Jack Shainman Gallery November 22 – January 11 Opening: November 22, 6-8PM 524 West 24th Street & 513 West 20th Street

The exhibition will span the past 26 years of Solano’s practice and will include historical works that have never been shown in New York alongside new sculptures. One of Spain’s most prominent contemporary artists, Solano first gained international recognition in the 80s and 90s and continues to delve into her powerful, intimate and poetic practice.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Art in Review: Susana Solano” (McKee Gallery exhibition review). The New York Times, 13 December 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/13/arts/art-in-review-724440.html

ART IN REVIEW

Susana Solano By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Published: December 13, 1996 Susana Solano

McKee Gallery

745 Fifth Avenue, at 58th Street

Through Jan. 14

Though she has widely exhibited in Europe and in group shows in the United States, this is

the first solo show in New York City for Susana Solano, the gifted sculptor from Barcelona.

Including nine big iron works, the earliest from 1993, it gives a sense of her Post-Minimalist

esthetic: refined and brooding, meaning distinctly Spanish.

The sculptures are mostly rectangular enclosures, cages or cribs, their sides made of mesh,

which become scribbled lines in air, a kind of drawing. With ''In Search of a Landscape,'' for

example, Ms. Solano cantilevers a pair of mesh rectangles from the wall for you to look

through, as if through a double-paned, etched glass window.

The forms are basic, even generic, but then altered. ''Lalibela No. 4'' is in the shape of a

cross, or the ground plan of a church, the corner of a gallery wall intersecting with the cross

in a way that brings the room into play, while ''Adjustment in the Void No. 2'' consists of

three large ovoid tubes arranged roughly like a Y on the floor. These are pure and

reductionist shapes, expressively so, and in that sense akin to Richard Deacon's or Martin

Puryear's sculptures. MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Aliaga, Juan Vicente. “Susana Solano.” Artforum, 1 April 1993. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-13905232.html

Susana Solano by Juan Vicente Aliaga | April 1, 1993

This first retrospective of Susana Solano's work is an exhibition of breadth in every sense of the word; it allows the spectator to come into contact with a rather large selection of her work. Solano's work has acquired consistency and international prestige in just a few years. Influences, conscious and unconscious, include some of Robert Morris' works of the late '60s which centered on the juxtaposition of planes and opaque elements, and the Minimalist coldness of some structures resembling cages, like his well-known Untitled (Steel grating), 1967, or Untitled (Aluminum grating), 1969; affinities also doubtlessly exist with some formal solutions developed by Solano. Even her early works, like Espluga or Enfront (In front), both from 1981, recall the work of Eduardo Chillida. But most of these similarities are, without a doubt, superficial. Solano's sculpture is based on pragmatic criteria. It is the construction of closed spaces, as hermetic as coffins, that predominates. However, in spite of this manifest impenetrability, Solano plays at the strange paradox of placing on opaque structures elements that allude to the transparency, to the filtration of light. This is what happens in pieces like Finals dels 90 (End of the '90s, 1990); on a rectangular, dark-iron box rest two sheets of glass which, in spite of what one might expect, do not allow the hidden interior to be seen. Another series of works, among them the splendid Dos Nones (Two odd numbers, 1988), and No te pases no. 3 (That's far enough #3, 1989), marry the use of closed surfaces with grates that, because of their Spartan austerity, create an atmosphere that wavers between the lattice windows of a convent and the bars of a jail cell. But what is Solano's credo? As she herself states, "art is nostalgia, reflection, and intellectualized passion." This is similar to a conception of art in which an individualist and a formalist vision coexist, anchored in the metaphysical, and in a certain romanticism. Constants show themselves in the exploration of the fluid within the solid, of suspension and flight between dark metallic sheets (thus the references to the angelic and the weightless are present in pieces of great material conviction). "Art leads to individual insanity, never to collective sanity," she states in another of her aphorisms to emphasize the scant beneficial effect that, in her opinion, art produces in the social setting. Curiously, in the catalogue, perhaps due to the desire to flee the cryptic hermeticism of her work, photos of highways, landscapes, ordinary travel scenes, and photos of the sculptures are juxtaposed. These images denounce the attempt to include the autobiographical in work which, when it becomes most interesting, does so precisely by avoiding personal anecdote. As much as it is reiterated in the catalogue, Solano's work is not generally conducive to narrative readings. In fact, her best works are those that stand on their visual hardness, the primacy of the compact, the roundness of the boxes that speak of private spaces. A perceptual roundness proves unsuccessful here; it is difficult due to the installation of the works. Quantity seems to have won out over quality.

COPYRIGHT1999 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

Artner, Alan G. “Shut-in Sculpture: New Work Of Susana Solano Seems To Seal Out The Viewer.” Chicago Tribune, 18 January 1990. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-01-18/features/9001050493_1_screenings-donald-young-gallery-viewers

Shut-in Sculpture New Work Of Susana Solano Seems To Seal Out The Viewer January 18, 1990|By Alan G. Artner, Art critic.

The exhibition of Susana Solano sculpture at the Donald Young Gallery, 325 W. Huron St.,

emphasizes a side of the young Barcelonan`s work that has less immediate appeal than the

cage- and pool-like pieces already known in Chicago.

This side finds representation in large enclosed forms that suggest something protected,

imprisoned or hidden. The forms, usually of metal, tantalize viewers by denying access, thus

forcing them back to only an imagined relationship between the interior space and its

conjectural contents and the viewers` own bodies. Here, however, Solano has added other dimensions by sealing two of the pieces with panels

of white marble, for we feel a (perhaps inevitable) funerary association along with an

indirect meditation on the coming together of cultures based on handwork and industrial

manufacture.

These pieces also have a heightened physical beauty that surpasses the three others on

show. But it is really a tradeoff, insofar as two of the others provide more generous open

forms and the third has strongly pleasing associations with modernist furniture. (Through

Saturday.)

Richard, Paul. “Art: The Planes of Solano’s Spain.” The Washington Post, 27 November 1989. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1225297.html

Art; The Planes of Solano's Spain

Paul Richard | November 27, 1989

Her materials are industrial. She works with wire mesh and PVC, dimpled sheets of greenish

glass, steel I-beams, lead. The shapes she prefers-her rectangles and cubes, parallels and grids-

are Euclidean and familiar. But a formalist description of Susana Solano's art utterly misleads.

She is both a minimalist and a poet. And it's the poetry that counts.

A quintet of her sculptures is on exhibition in the small Directions gallery at the Hirshhorn

Museum and Sculpture Garden. Despite those sheets of steel, little here suggests the foundry or

the factory. Nor, despite those grids and cubes, is the viewer much reminded of the austere

white-walled galleries of 1960s art. If one listens carefully one hears within these objects an

echoing of memories and a dark Iberian music. Solano's modern art is completely non-New

Yorky. Its spirit is the spirit of Catalonian Spain.

Her tables feel like altars prepared for holy sacrifice. Above them one can hear the chanting of

the Mass. When she wraps a plane of steel around a post of pine the viewer almost hears the

clank of metal swords on armor. In the dark sheet of her steel plates one glimpses the reflections

of the patent leather hats of the guardia civil. "No Te Pases No. 1" (1988), a low and railed

platform paved in thick, translucent glass, seems at once a bridge and the heavy greenish river

flowing beneath it. The oldest object on display is "Espai Ambulant" of 1986. The title is Catalan

for "Ambulant Space." The object thus described might well be a cage from a touring provincial

circus. It's a wall around an absence. In it one can hear the faint padding of a tiger, a panther, a

bear or some other jailed spirit pacing back and forth.

Solano, born in Barcelona in 1946, is one of the most gifted of contemporary Spanish sculptors.

The languages she uses-both the Catalan she speaks and the forms she deploys-would have been

prohibited while Franco ruled Spain.

He brutalized her city. And he was not the first. The story of Barcelona is drenched with grief

and blood, political suppression, garrotings and riots. Anarchists there hurled bombs at their

enemies not long ago. Solano has not forgotten. Though Barcelona has been delivered, a mood

of sacrifice, imprisonment, suffering and mourning still glows within her art.

Richard, Paul. “Art: The Planes of Solano’s Spain.” The Washington Post, 27 November 1989. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1225297.html

"La Caritiat No. 5" of 1988 (which takes its name from the charitable poorhouse, now a

Barcelona art museum where it was constructed) is a sort of haunted doorway with posts like

armored sentinels. In form it calls to mind Antoni Gaudi's gateways, the doors of city churches,

and the prehistoric dolmens of the Catalonian countryside. It's a sort of arch of triumph, or

defeat, built to honor ghosts. It is too low for a doorway. To walk through it one must stoop.

Four of these five sculptures ("Bon Appetit, Messieurs" of 1989, a sort of table-altar, is the

exception) evoke that troubled sense of invitation-and exclusion. That cage cannot be entered,

that river-bridge is barred. "Bany Rus" (1988) is a sort of Turkish bath wrapped around in metal

mist. Its walls of steel mesh invite and exclude your glance. They are there to keep you out.

Much of older Barcelona art-the abstractions of Miro, the fantasies of Dali, Gaudi's wondrous

buildings, the welded steel sculptures of Juli Gonzalez, or the tavern signs of painted tin made

by the young Picasso for El Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), the famous artists' hangout there-

suggests an antic playfulness. But Picasso's beggars starve and grieve, and Dali's deserts burn,

and one can almost always sense some old and bitter pain underneath the fun.

There is very little fun, and much Spanish somberness, in Solano's sculpture. Unlike Donald

Judd's or Tony Smith's, it is never crisp or cool. Her parallels aren't quite parallel, her geometry

is slightly skewed, her welds are rough, intentionally, and her steel plates are stained and

scratched and streaked. Her materials say machine shop, but her touch is not disguised. This is

homemade, handmade art.

In 1909, Joan Maragall, the Barcelona poet, wrote an essay called "The Burnt-Out Church":

"I had never heard a Mass like that one. The vaulting of the damaged church, the crusted,

smoke-stained walls, the vanished altars, above all that great dark void where the high altar had

stood ... I had never heard a Mass like that one. The Sacrifice was present there, alive and

bleeding ... I had never heard a Mass like that one ... We all heard it as never before ... as only

the first Christians could have experienced it, persecuted and hiding in a corner of the

Catacombs, delighting above all, amid danger and denial, in the beginnings of the mystery of

redemption. ... "

Something of that spirit, that sense of trials passed and sacrifice remembered, of protection and

imprisonment-and redemption just beginning-sings in this small show. It was organized by the

Hirshhorn's Phyllis Rosenzweig. It closes Feb. 11.

Copyright 2009 The Washington Post

and saturates its wide smooth surfaces and simple As in the earlier pieces, the new works show lit- structures with poetry. tle trace of the sculptor's gesture or touch, except

If Solano had suppressed the associative poten- in the most coolly intellectual way. Most of them tial of sculpture in her early objects, she quickly are of iron, the surfaces of the different planes moved to allow it, even to play upon it, so that the revealing little variation. Sometimes, however, So- receptacles, for example, also become cavities or primitive crucibles, permeated with interacting forces that have allowed Solano to pass from a sculpture in dialogue with iwlf to one made up of individualist pieces in relationship with the world. From here she has proceeded to juggle the references and assump- tions that conventionally define sculpture, subjecting the traditional values of form, scale, space. and material to an imaginative transformation that moves the work into a dynamically ambiguous field wherein her poetic artifacts can also implicate architecture, design, and even engineering. This expansive en- trance into additional territories has not interrupted a steady trajectory of development. Controlled am- biguity and a rich and subtle sense of irony are con- stants, and the symbolic dimension dominates the purely formal one.

SUUM Sol8no, P 8 8 ~ 8 d. trur8H p8tm in motion), 1W, iron, ca. 1% x 19% x l o r .

lano also uses galvanized iron or lead; through dif- ferent combinations of these materials she sets up contrasts of texture, weight, dullness and bright- ness, malleability and rigidity. When lead forms part of a piece it is often contained inside one of the symbolic receptacles of Solano's art, and it often looks dramatically organic. This work can cross right over the traditional borders of sculpture into associations of architecture or design, but it is clear- ly removed from function by its sculptural volume, use of materials, scale, and simplified form, and above all by our attention to its internal energy. Impluvium, 1987, for example, is a rectangle of galvanized plates laid down flat and framed by an iron rim, the base for a gateless iron fence. The vi- sual reference to a pool strikes both ironically and poignantly against the forbidding fence and the bright hard surface that stands in for the pool's water.

Among the strengths of Solano's recent art is its ability to meld matter and image, sensual percep- tion and conceptual grasp. The work's relationship

to representation is complex. 'varying from the highly associative to the highly meditative. Both cases involve a kind of poetics of transformation. The work Solano plans for Monster, for example, which as yet exists only in maquette, at first recalls a simple round tower; as one looks, though, Solano's poetics begin to work their changes. From the base of the tower, an articulated tunnel or col- onnade winds outward like a marquee. The roof, supported by a double row of rude columns, is a very beautiful elongated awning of irregular iron scales. One could read this trailing structure as an animal's tail, and the tower as some strange con- tainer of vital animal life; or as a string of fire- crackers, the fuse for a child's rocket, like those used in Catalonia to celebrate the coming of summer. which scatter small gifts and trinkets when they explode. The work becomes the symbol for an in- nocent, pagan game-yet one can be ignorant of its possible symbologies and still be affected by its architectural Dower.

Elsewhere, Solano passes from the evocation or

suggestion of architectural structures and domestic obFcts to an effect of the sacred. Some pieces have the schematic frontality of an altar and altarpiece, and the evocative force of such conjunctions, but not in the worshipful way demanded by religious structures or icons. There is no narrative here. In Amplio parkntesis (Ample parenthesis, 1986), the curved outline of the work's upper comers bestows a delicate, affirmative feeling on the rigid iron of which the piece is made, setting up an exquisite balance between symbolism, ornament, objective form, and the humane presence of the work as a whole. The altarlike works generate a strangely powerful symbolic energy, feeling like sacred shells, or perhaps the protective armor, for mysterious, un- seen, slowly emerging new forces of life. One is drawn to these big, androgynous shapes and volumes as though their quality of other time, other place, might take us to the new forms we're search- ing for to represent, but not to reduce, our com- ulex Dresent.

~ h l o o k at Solano's work with such concentra- 103

tion because she never falls for the spectacular gesture, the imposition of superfluous artifice on a form that is already so visually generous. She avoids cheap tricks: the relatively simple structures of her work are animated neither by any overt evo- cation of sculptural tradition nor by easy figurative references. To experience her work is to enter a space of encounter between associations of images and materials on the one hand and, on the other, the artist's emptying into the work of her internal energy and sentiment. The process has its major catalyst in subtlety, the active ingredient in Solano's sculpture that generates the possibility for the in- timate experience of works of art, and for the poten- tial transformations that accompany such experi- ences-transformations both of the viewer and of the work, which can expand from being another object to an enigmatic container of life force. These are Solano's poetics of transformation.0

Gloria Mmrr contributes teplarly to AflJbtum.

Translated fmm the Spanish by Hanna Hannah