Teresa Solar Abboud: Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman

Kunstverein Hannover is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Teresa Solar Abboud in Germany, dedicating space to a pivotal moment in her artistic work. The exhibition Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman brings together a number of key works and introduces two new commissions: an expansion of the Tuneladora series and a new group of self-portraits that give the exhibition its title.

Teresa Solar Abboud works across large-scale sculpture, delicate drawing, and video. Her works interpret material entities as states of transformation—situated between the organic and the synthetic, the interior and the exterior, the embryonic and the mature. These tensions do not suggest opposites but evoke a non-dualistic, processual reality.

At the core of Solar Abboud’s artistic practice lies an interest in the dense and intricate networks of life—cultural, geological, industrial, and organic—and in their overlaps, intertwinings, and collisions.

Drawing from Solar Abboud’s interest in (auto-)fiction, as well as in questions of natural history, ecology, and anatomy, the artist conceives of pregnancy as an inwardly directed creative pressure—understanding the pregnant body as an operative zone in which collapse and (re)construction are inextricably intertwined. Vessels become bodies, and bodies become vessels; matter reorganizes itself from within to form new capacities for agency.

Teresa Solar Abboud, born 1985 in Madrid to an Egyptian mother and a Spanish father, works across sculpture, drawing, and video. Solar Abboud recently inaugurated a new sculptural outdoor work for the Hayward Gallery London and was honored with a solo show by MACBA Barcelona and Museum C2AM Madrid. Her work was part of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia: The Milk of Dreams and she showed a new work at The High Line in New York. Her work is held in the collections of the Reina Sofia, TBA21, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and FRAC Corsica, among others.