Artists

Teresa Solar Abboud

Press release

Lehmann Maupin presents Atlantic Ridge Multiplicity, an exhibition of new work from Madrid-based artist Teresa Solar Abboud. Solar Abboud’s multidisciplinary practice explores ideas of interrelation, hybridity, and metamorphosis through sculpture, works on paper, installation, and video. Her diverse bodies of work offer speculative reimaginings of both the known and the unknown world, engaging themes ranging from subterranean landscapes and ecological entanglements, to subatomic dynamics and organic processes mapped across deep time. Atlantic Ridge Multiplicity marks Solar Abboud’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. It follows her recent outdoor installation, Mother Tongue, at the Hayward Gallery in London and her 2025 solo exhibitions Bird Dream Machine at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman at Kunstverein Hannover, Germany. Over the past decade, Solar Abboud has developed a distinct practice rooted in the material properties of clay. Her well known Tunnel Boring Machines, which were featured in the 59th Venice Biennale’s The Milk of Dreams, combine visibly hand-worked clay with brightly saturated, precisely finished resin appendages whose shapes echo flippers, pincers, or beaks. These sculptures hypothesize the hidden forces and beings that form the Underground—the vast expanse of earth which we traverse daily but that remains fundamentally unknowable to us. In her newest series, Multiplicity (2026), Solar Abboud delves into the strange dislocation between body and psyche triggered in host bodies during pregnancy, as they gestate a foreign life within their own. Based on her own experiences as a pregnant woman, Solar Abboud invites us to rethink ourselves as multiple beings intertwined with others rather than independent, self-contained entities. Her Multiplicity sculptures reflect these ideas of interrelation alongside the reality of physical pressure. Rendered in blue and black, the works hang suspended from the gallery ceiling, fragments of organic and inorganic beings, folded and compressed, nested into each other in ways that suggest compaction from external forces. Here, Solar Abboud extends the notion of feeling like a foreigner in one's own body to the Earth itself, suggesting that while we remain estranged from the forces shaping its hidden interior, we are also intimately entangled with them. The exhibition also features six new works on paper, which are part of Solar Abboud’s Oozing Out series. In these works the artist captures fragments reminiscent of bones or organs, appearing as if suspended mid-motion. While these entities evade obvious taxonomical classification, each has a distinctly organic quality that posits an innate connection to the natural world. Presented in isolation, some works evoke images of fossils, or skeletons—the outcome of bodies compressed for millenia—while others recall ovaries, glands, or other soft tissue. The exhibition’s title comes from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the world's longest mountain range, which lies submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean and stretches more than 10,000 miles along the ocean floor. This site of great, protracted pressure is paradoxical, creating both crushing, destructive effects, as well as generative ones, such as the eruption of lava creating new land from the ocean, or the shift of tectonic plates forming mountains across eons of pressure. Atlantic Ridge Multiplicity reflects these profound dichotomies, understanding that a single force can produce multiple outcomes simultaneously.