Susana Solano's "Cappello" library Meta Memphis edition 1989

Metal shelving piece, by artist Susana Solano, Meta Memphis, Italy, 1989. This was a limited edition of 25 pieces for Memphis Milano. The book case shelving is adjustable in height. Feels like a Japanese inspired pentagon group piece. Guggenheim: Susana Solano was born in Barcelona in 1946 and studied at the city's Real acadèmia Catalana de bellas artes de San Jorge (now the Reial acadèmia Catalana de belles arts de Sant Jordi). As a child she was exposed to the beauty of her country through frequent visits to a family estate "El Palau" in Falset, as well as Sant Gregori, Valldoreix, and the Mediterranean Coast—all locations that profoundly influenced her relationship to space and materials and their use in her sculpture, drawing, and photography. She belongs to a generation of Spanish sculptors working in the country's ironwork tradition who gained prominence after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. While Solano has made abstract works on paper throughout her life, she began creating the sculpture for which she is best known in 1979. Her first solo exhibition was in 1980 at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and included a group of brass-and-wood sculptures and sewn-canvas wall hangings. Thereafter 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. Distinct from her Catelonian predecessor Julio González and the American

Ref. : KAE6RJFP