Teresa Solar Abboud: Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman

Kunstverein Hannover presents Teresa Solar Abboud’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

The sensitivity of artist Teresa Solar Abboud is unrivalled. With each setting she engages with, she acknowledges its potential for shaping the perception of others. Conceived as a multimedia environment, Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman unfolds across sculpture, drawing, and video. Her works thrive on the links between drawing and sculpture, unbridled thought and seamlessly executed objects.  

Born in Madrid, Solar Abboud brings her background to the fore in a creative process that appreciates evolution over linear progress and challenges the conventional thinking about creating artistic objects. In this way, the artist approaches prehistoric fossils as if they were machines of the future and dares to translate the experience of maternity into surfaces and objects. Her works adjust themselves to the rooms they inhabit, acting much like living organisms. Expanding on Solar Abboud’s practice, the exhibition considers the female body as an active site where rupture and repair are intertwined.

In Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman clay, resin, and metal, as well as lines drawn on paper and three-dimensional sculptural forms meet together in shapes that carry instinctive memories of the past, recollections of landscapes and entities that echo things primeval, the ebb and flow of the ocean, or the smoothness and resistance of water.

As Chus Martínez wrote on the occasion of the exhibition: “The practice of Teresa Solar Abboud is concerned with teaching matter to behave like a living organism. She hopes that matter truly listens to her hands and learns to transform itself into a living cell. Sculpture was once a discipline centered on questions of form. Gradually, form began to generate movement—and with it the possibility that inorganic substance could become alive, dynamic, capable of speaking about dimensions of life that only living beings had ever experienced.

Teresa Solar Abboud’s practice strives for a mode of existing in the world that is defined by elasticity. Elastic bodies have elastic minds—able to understand more, accept more, give more. As the Canadian poet and thinker Anne Carson once remarked: ‘To dream of fins is to remember that our bones once longed for water.’ Teresa Solar Abboud’s sculptures dream of fins.

Why? Every movement in the ocean begins as friction. But the fin teaches us that progress is not opposition—it is a relationship, a repeated, flowing relationship with our surroundings. The fin embodies the ongoing conversation between body and world. This rhythm is a form of intelligence. Our limbs were once fins. All we must learn is how to return to the lap of Mother Earth and be reborn with the capacity to reclaim a sense of peaceful coexistence and deep respect for life.

Have you ever wondered why Teresa Solar Abboud places such trust in color? Because she—standing in for all of us—strives to recover the light that has been lost in our minds and in our world.”

This exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover follows Teresa Solar Abboud’s solo presentations at MACBA (Barcelona), Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). The artist recently inaugurated a new sculptural outdoor work for the Hayward Gallery London. Her commissioned work for The High Line, New York City entitled Birth of Islands was on view in 2024–25; she also participated in the 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams, Venice, 2022.

Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman at Kunstverein Hannover is curated by Christoph Platz-Gallus and Carlota Gómez.

The exhibition and program are supported by the Ministry for Arts and Science of Lower-Saxony (MWK); Stiftung Niedersachsen; Nord/LB Culture Foundation; VHV Foundation; ACCIÓN CULTURAL ESPAÑOLA; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, London; and Travesía Cuatro.

Program

January 14, 2026, 5pm
Prof. Dr. Ursula Ströbele: “My Gesture Relates to the Human Body”—Women Sculptors and the Origin of Material
Keynote by Prof. Dr. Ursula Ströbele, Professor of Art History with a focus on contemporary art at the HBK, Braunschweig and recently co-curator of Alina Szapocznikow: Body Languages, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany.

January 28, 6pm
All the things that are not there: film by Teresa Solar Abboud
41 minutes, English original version
Film screening
Communal Cinema Hannover (KoKi)

January 29–31, 7pm
Jerron Herman: LAX
Performance. With audio description
In collaboration with Hannover‘s Real Dance Festival, renowned U.S. dancer and choreographer Jerron Herman presents a new work site-responsively developed for the show of Teresa Solar Abboud. Staged within the exhibition spaces of Kunstverein Hannover, the performance explores stillness as an act of bodily perception, charting a course between control and release. With striking physical clarity, Herman transforms the gallery into a site of resistance to performance pressure, productivity demands, and ableism—inviting audiences to reconsider how bodies move, rest, and take up space.

February 19, 5pm
Katja Schroeder: Parents in Arts
Keynote by Katja Schroeder, Curator and co-director of the Parents in Arts Program initiated by the City of Hamburg’s Culture and Media Administration with M.1 Arthur Boskamp Foundation Hamburg

Press contact: Nane Anna Bohn, presse@kunstverein-hannover.de