Multimedia artist Teresa Solar Abboud (b. 1985 Madrid, Spain; lives and works in Madrid) creates sculptures, drawings, and videos characterized by an interest in fiction, storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. Across her practice, her works allude to material entities in states of transformation, exploring tensions between the organic and synthetic, interior and exterior, gestation and birth, and embryonic and advanced.
Solar Abboud is known for her large-scale sculpture groupings that construct surreal, hybrid worlds. She works with contrasting materials, like clay and found objects, and often integrates the use of human symbols to create works that appear at once biologically and industrially produced. Her sculptural exteriors often have an electric hue and machine-like sheen finish, blurring the boundary between real and imagined. In particular, clay takes on consequential meaning throughout the artist’s process: as a primordial geological substance and constituent part of the built environment, it is naturally suffused with stories of self-protection, isolation, and transformation. Her recent projects explore her conceptual concerns through sculptures that take on zoomorphic or anthropomorphic shapes, simultaneously evoking individually embodied functions and the complex structures of relational space in an industrial world.
Solar Abboud recently participated in the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani in 2022; recent solo exhibitions include CA2M in Madrid, Spain and MACBA in Barcelona, Spain, both in 2024, which were accompanied by her first monograph, as well as the unveiling of a major site-specific commission for the High Line in New York in 2024. Her traveling solo exhibition Bird Dream Machine is currently on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin through October 2025.
Solar Abboud’s work is included in notable museum collections, such as: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; TBA21 Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid, Spain; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Colección Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain; Colección CA2M - Comunidad de Madrid, Spain; Colección MAEC Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, Madrid, Spain; Colección Fundación Coca-Cola, Madrid, Spain, and the Colección Museo FRAC Córcega, France, among others.