Teresa Solar Abboud, born in Madrid in 1985, is a Spanish-Egyptian artist whose work traverses sculpture, installation, drawing, and video, often exploring the intersections between nature and technology, language and matter, and body and landscape. Raised in a bilingual and bicultural home, she grew up between Spanish and Egyptian traditions, a duality that deeply permeates her work. Though she speaks Arabic fluently, she cannot read or write it, and this dissonance—between sound and symbol, speech and comprehension—has shaped her interest in the physicality and limits of communication.

She originally studied fine art in Madrid and later expanded her practice through postgraduate studies, thanks in part to a Fundación La Caixa scholarship. Teresa’s early works leaned toward video and performance, but over time, her focus shifted toward sculpture as a means to investigate more tactile and spatial forms of expression. Her materials—ceramic, resin, and metal—are selected not only for their industrial strength but for their symbolic resonance. She creates forms that look like fragments of tunnels, boats, bones, mouths—hybrid objects that blur boundaries between the mechanical and the biological.

Teresa's sculptures often evoke a sense of migration and transformation. In “Osteoclast,” shown at the 2021 Liverpool Biennial, she presented a sequence of long, colorful forms that resemble both bones and kayaks, suspended in tension, suggesting vessels of passage, of bodily and geographical transit. In her 2022 presentation at the Venice Biennale, she delved further into this metaphor of movement and excavation with "Tunnel Boring Machines," a series of monumental sculptures that fuse organic curves with mechanical geometry.

Her work is not only an exploration of form but of language—its gaps, mechanics, and materiality. This thematic concern resonates with her own linguistic experience, particularly the fragmentary relationship she maintains with the written Arabic language. She channels this tension into art that speaks without needing to be read, that touches on the sensory and primal elements of understanding.

Her most recent solo exhibition, “Bird Machine Dream” at MACBA (2024–2025), traces the evolution of her practice, showing how her early interest in narrative and film has morphed into immersive spatial storytelling using sculptural installations. In 2024, she also installed “Birth of Islands” along the High Line in New York, a piece that rises from the ground in a conversation between emergence and erosion, nature and urbanity.

Teresa Solar Abboud continues to establish herself as a vital voice in contemporary art, offering works that are both formally arresting and intellectually rigorous, always operating in that rich space between the personal and the planetary.

You can explore more about her work on her official website: https://www.teresolar.com.