A Meitat De Cami – Halfway There

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Press Release

SUSANA SOLANO

A Meitat de Camí – Halfway There

November 22, 2013 – January 11, 2014

Susana Solano’s creative structure has taken shape all throughout her career like one of the metallic meshes that are a constant feature of her works. It has shaped a map of communicating vessels in which material, space, senses and life experience make up a fluid continuum.Susana Solano’s works, regardless of the materials used and their size, correspond to an underlying idea of witnessing existence through its materialization as a memory of her emotional relationships with spaces, shapes and people.For this reason, every sculpture absorbs and expresses personal experiences that radiate out over the setting and transform them, as if it were a cosmic game.- Llorente, Díaz Marta. Introduction.Susana Solano: Proyectos = Projects. Barcelona: G. Gili, 2007.

My ideal space is a unique space, empty of stories, with which I could fall in love.A space unknown to me, an atmosphere of thought.I want now to concentrate on a life in which there is nothing and to work with the minimum possible.- Solano, Susana.Susana Solano: Dibuixos, Escultures, Fotografies, Instal·lacions : Muecas.Barcelona: Museu D'Art Contemporani De Barcelona, 1999.

Opening reception: Friday, November 22nd, from 6 – 8 PM at 513 West 20th Street and 524 West 24th Street

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce A meitat de camí – Halfway there, Susana Solano’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 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.

Solano is best known for her abstract sculptures made from a range of materials that includes iron, steel, lead, glass, rattan and wire mesh. She belongs to a generation of pioneering female sculptors who expanded a realm conventionally dominated by men. Within the traditions of post-minimalism, Solano’s work conveys a connection to personal memory, domestic space, and the natural world. With the artist’s hand leaving traces of her process, the rigidity of the materials is counterbalanced with the personal. Her approach is one that channels architectural forms and consideration of space with a delicate quality that balances the natural and the industrial.

Since including Solano in a group exhibition in 1989 entitled Dialogue with Space, the gallery has been intrigued with the way her work generates a provocative psychological space through its minimal, architectural qualities. The exhibition in both of the gallery’s Chelsea locations will include many of Solano’s most iconic sculptures, as well as work from a series dedicated to Philip Guston, wall based sculptures, and rattan works influenced in part by the artist’s travels to Africa and Asia.

In the 1989 text that accompanied Solano’s solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn, Phyllis Rosenzweig wrote, “Solano’s sculptures attest to a continuing belief in art’s evocative power.The contemporary appeal of her work resides in its austere formal beauty and conflation of cultural reference and memory.”

Susana Solano lives and works in Barcelona. Her group exhibitions include Skulptur Projekte Münster and Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany (1987), São Paulo Biennial (1987), the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1988), the Carnegie International (1988), and the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2007). She has also had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1989-90), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1992 and 2003), Whitechapel Gallery, London (1993), the Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (1999), and Museo Casa de la Moneda, Madrid (2012-13). Her 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 Sofía, Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, among others.

Upcoming exhibitions at the gallery include Jackie Nickerson: Terrain at 513 West 20th Street and Radcliffe Bailey at 524 West 24th Street. Both exhibitions open January 16th and remain on view through February15, 2014.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. The gallery is open by appointment only from December 24th through January 1st. For additional information and photographic material please contact the gallery at info@jackshainman.com.