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Teresa Solar Abboud
Tunnel Boring Machine, 2022

Installation view: Abundant Futures in Troubled Times, Works from the TBA21 Collection, C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de

Teresa Solar Abboud

Commissions

Abundant Futures

Ceramic, resin, car paint
Commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Donated by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary to the Fundación Museo Reina Sofía

Tuneladora (Tunnel Boring Machine) is part of the new series of sculptures (2021-) produced by Teresa Solar under the same title, investigating the formal intricacies of the industrial apparatus designed to cut through soil and rock. Modeled after heavy-duty machinery, the sculptures emulate and build on a vibrant biomimetic vocabulary. Giant beaks, wings, fins, and claws rise from robust ceramic bases. They are made of resin and are brightly colored with acrylic automotive paint. For Tuneladora, a crude stump of clay carries the imprint of the hands and fingers that shaped it, which starkly contrasts with the slick, colorful, and elegantly engineered protuberances that emerge from it. The zoomorphic extensions are like the “fingery eyes” of a barnacle or the oversized claws of a prehistoric animal that has ascended from the earth’s crust. They could have pierced through the mineral ground and interacted with the deep strata of residues piled up in layers of sediment. Solar’s sculptures allude to hybrid objects, between the organic and the synthetic, the ancestral and the futuristic. Critic Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga compares these earth-boring scenarios to the divination practice of dowsing, employed to sense and locate groundwater, oil, radiations, and earth vibrations. To her, the artist channels “an imagination that runs through tunnels, passageways, galleries and cavernous systems buried in the bowels of both the earth and the body.”

The large-scale Tuneladora, newly commissioned for this exhibition, emerged from a set of drawings Solar created during the Spheric Ocean expedition organized by TBA21–Academy to New Zealand in 2018.

Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1985. Lives in Madrid, Spain.

In Conversation: Chus Martínez & Teresa Solar, a talk part of TBA21–Academy's 'The Current II' Convening 'Phenomenal Ocean', 2019, on ocean-archive.org

Spheric Ocean, TBA21–Academy The Current II Expedition #1 To Find The Vegan Lion, led by Chus Martínez, New Zealand, 9-24 March 2018, logbook

Teresa Solar. Tuneladora, 2022. Article by Madeline Weizburg, Venice Biennale 2022 here

Teresa Solar. Articles collection, exhibitions, critical texts and interviews. Galería Travesía Cuatro. Press kit here