Susana Solano was born in Barcelona in 1946, the same city where she studies Fine Arts and makes contact with the art world through painting. Graduated in 1976, she began a brief pictorial journey that ended up taking her to sculpture in the early 1980s, a record that she will use in her work to this day. Her work is frequently linked to postminimalism, as well as to other Spanish sculptors like Juli González, Jorge Oteiza or Eduardo Chillida. Iron and wicker are common in her work, although she has also worked through industrial forging, always with a clear intention of exploring the relationship between space and artist.

Solano creates symbolic spaces in abstract forms, drawing inspiration from nature, the environment, and memory; and that induces us to observe them and take sides. Based on her own experiences, she raises questions about the human being and her relationship with her habitat. We find architectures like cavities, receptacles, deposits or hills that it explores the limits between visible and hidden. In this context, the concept of epidermis acquires a great meaning, since the covering is a fundamental part of the works, since it is presented as a container and exhibitor of a less visible nucleus, but of equal or greater significance.

About her exhibition career, it starts in 1980 at Espai 10 in Fundació Joan Miró with an individual exhibition. From that moment, her work spreads around Europe, in important places like Serpentine Gallery in London, CAPC-Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux or Documenta 8 in Kassel. Also, at the end of the eighties, she starts to exhibit in the United States through institutions like Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of Smithsonian Institution in Washington D. C. or Donald Young Gallery in Chicago. It highlights, among others, her retrospective presented in Palacio Velázquez of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1992, later it itinerates to Grenoble, London and Malmö.

Currently, we can find Solano’s works in the world’s most prominent museums and collections, such as The Utsu-Kushi-Ga-Hara Open Air Museum of Tokyo, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam or MoMA in New York. Furthermore, she won prizes like Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1988 or Premio Tomás Francisco Prieto of Real Casa de la Moneda in 2011, among others.