Teresa Solar: Life on the surface

Kunsthalle Lissabon is thrilled to announce Life on the surface, the first solo exhibition in Portugal by the Spanish artist Teresa Solar.

What emerges on the surface, what has the strength to transform, hybridize, and survive the changes of our geological eras, seems to be what interests the artist Teresa Solar the most. Through the use of corporeal forms and tactile fantasies, she gives life to her sculptural imagery, inflected by fiction and storytelling, natural history, and anatomy.

At Kunsthalle Lissabon the artist presents a large-scale new sculpture, an entity, whose earthy and tubular canalizations are held aloft by parts that resemble fingers or stingers: these are fragments of an abstract body seen through a magnifying glass. Fragments of multiple bodies only partially glimpsed that have only started to protrude from the earth.

The stingers have in their morphology something pneumatic, their polished and dynamic finish reminds us of blades and oars, which contrast with the heavy and immobile presence of the mud that connects them. A kind of carcass perhaps belonging to some deep-seated dweller.

This amalgamation of the geological and shapeless materiality of the mud with the hyper-defined plasticity of the stingers combines two registers present in the artist's work: the cavernous raw and abstract power of the clay with the updating vector of fiction, which crystallizes in a language, both symbolic and aesthetic, both sharp and precise.

The artist imagines a subsoil full of powers, full of overlapping times, events, and periods. In that sense, a huge ochre drawing, which leaves the walls of the artist’s studio for the first time, guides the visitor like a travel manual, and invites the public to participate in the creation process, but also to discover the genealogy of her research. The lines guide us and, at the same time, confuse our gaze between the shapes and words, sometimes more peremptory, others more poetically. And suddenly we find ourselves in a pulsating organ of ideas that shamelessly disclose the artist's ecosystem of thoughts. With the small sculpture as well as with the three drawings scattered throughout the space, the artist insists on investigating the folds of the subsoil, entrusting them with the task of revealing to the visitor the internal section of what remains beneath the surface.

Teresa Solar Abboud (Madrid, 1985) lives and works in Madrid. She recently took part at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia The Milk of Dreams in 2022, and in the Liverpool Biennial in 2021. Recent solo shows include Time of worms at Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona; Big Mouth, within Boundaries, Oozing out in 1946, The Hague; Formas de fuga at Travesía Cuatro Madrid; Pumping Station at Travesía Cuatro CDMX; Ride, Ride, Ride at Matadero Madrid and Index Foundation, Stockholm and Flotation Line at Der TANK, Institut Kunst in Basel. She has taken part in group shows at C3A, Córdoba, as part of the TBA21 Collection; Fondazione Sandretto’s Young Curators Residency Programme in Madrid, Spain; Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev; Museo de Arte Abstracto, Cuenca, Spain; Centro Conde Duque, Madrid; Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, Spain; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, CA2M, Madrid; Haus der Kunst, Münich, Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander; Maxxi, Rome; General Public in Berlin; Kunstverein München; CA2M, Madrid and La Casa Encendida, Madrid. Her work is part of the MACBA Collection, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary – TBA21 Collection, the Fundación ARCO, as well as the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Kunsthalle Lissabon is kindly supported by República Portuguesa / DGArtes, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Maria, and Armando Cabral’s Collection. Life on the surface is also supported by Acción Cultural Española and Travesía Cuatro Gallery.

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