No te pases, con escalera de emergencia (Take It Easy, with Emergency Ladder)

Susana Solano is one of the key Spanish artists in the second half of the 20th century, playing a crucial role in reviving contemporary sculpture in the late 1980s. She held her first solo show at the Miró Foundation’s Espai 10 in 1983, featuring works in wood and textiles. Shortly afterwards, a series of her works made innovative use of avant-garde sculptural materials such as iron and steel, for which she achieved international recognition. In 1987, she participated in Kassel’s Documenta 8, the 19th São Paulo Biennial and Münster’s Skulptur Projekte, where her piece was chosen to remain in the city permanently. 

Solano moved away from minimalist formalism to create work bearing a strong subjective imprint of its own. No te pases, con escalera de emergencia (Don’t Go Too Far, with Emergency Staircase) is linked to a series of works that would characterise her participation in the Venice Biennale in 1988. They are placed as boundary markers of an interior space accessible only to the gaze. The work displays craftsmanship based on industrial materials and structures such as sheet metal and iron mesh. These accentuate the strange intimacy of her sculpture’s role as a threshold by enclosing an impassable interior, thus her works become monuments to an interior space containing a strong emotional charge