Introduction
Two characteristics present throughout the work of Teresa Solar Abboud (Madrid, 1985) are the resistance of language and the morphology of speech. Her work, based on a continuous search for multiple concepts, is expressed by enormous sculptural installations which, in recent years, have become more complex with forms related to resistance, hollowness, the body and bone structure. Although she initially used drawing and video as her primary working tools, over time her work has become increasingly devoted to sculpture and new materials. These, with which she has created a series of forms that draw on elements related to the organic, lead to a world of metaphors related to the flow of currents, voids and the relationship between orifices and hollows.
This project, entitled Machine Dream Bird, once again alludes to the relationship with matter, language and bodily production. The exhibition focuses on two large installations that encapsulate the research carried out by Teresa Solar Abboud over the last few years. Conceived specifically for the CA2M Museum, the exhibition will span two different spaces on the first floor of the museum with newly produced work displayed alongside previously produced pieces. This is the first time this exhibition has been shown. The first room, in pink, is intended to be a surprising, uterine space, featuring sculptures from the Tunnel Boring Machine series, with an emphasis on horizontal and vertical constructions by using forms where the softness of the gesture contrasts with the plasticity of the material, thereby underlining one of the ideas that runs through this artist's work; namely, the idea of visual alteration via new systems of colour and forms related to nature itself.
The second space, which is very high and is the museum’s atrium, displays some of the pieces – exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial – suspended from the ceiling, where the comparison of a bone in relation to a kayak is once again present. Also shown here will be some newly produced sculptures that the artist relates to reproductive organs.
The exhibition is like a dialogue between the fictitious and the real, where different ongoing narratives put forward new forms and aesthetic finishes, juxtaposing the effects of nature with industrial style finishes that are smooth and glossy. But it is not only sculpture that has recently featured prominently in Teresa Solar Abboud’s work; drawing also offers a good account of the reflection and organisation that structures the perception and experience of the origin of each form, of each piece and of the relationships produced between them, either drawn or expressed in clay or forged in metal.
This project emerged as a result of the interest shown by the CA2M Museum and MACBA in organising a solo exhibition of Teresa Solar Abboud’s work in order to showcase her output over the last few years. The project is curated by Tania Pardo, Deputy Director of the CA2M Museum, and Claudia Segura, curator of exhibitions and of the MACBA collection. The main idea behind this project is to develop a museography that varies, changes and expands in very different ways in each of its venues.
The project begins with the exhibition at the CA2M Museum as a “space of contraction”, where the artist will install in two pieces specifically designed for these spaces. They will then be shown at the MACBA, and the “space of dilation” phase, where the exhibition will be expanded with new pieces. After the MACBA exhibition, it will travel to Turin to be exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, where it will be curated by Irene Calderoni, chief curator of the foundation, who will create a new interpretation of her work, while maintaining some of the installations shown at previous venues. Mutating in each venue, the exhibition explores other kinds of inter-institutional complicities where the artist’s practice expands and dilates according to the space in which it is located.
Teresa Solar Abboud’s work is part of the CA2M Museum and MACBA collections.
A bilingual catalogue designed by the Setanta studio will be published at the same time as the exhibition. It will include texts by the exhibition curators Tania Pardo, Claudia Segura and Irene Calderoni together with others by Chus Martinez, Manuela Moscoso as well as a conversation between Cecilia Alemany and the artist Teresa Solar Abboud.