Teresa Solar Abboud at Kunstverein Hannover

Kunstverein Hannover is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition of Teresa Solar Abboud in Germany, marking a defining moment in the artist’s evolving practice. Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman brings together a selection of her acclaimed works from recent years and introduces two major new sculptural productions commissioned by

Kunstverein Hannover: Tunnel Boring Machine (Atlantic Ridge Multiplicity) and a new suite of Self-Portrait sculptures, which lend the exhibition its title and extend her exploration of hybrid, emergent bodies. The presentation also includes early video works and two dedicated rooms of drawings, demonstrating the breadth and continuity of Solar Abboud’s formal vocabulary.

At the centre of her work lies an inquiry into the dense and intertwined networks that shape life—cultural, geological, industrial, and organic—and the ways these systems overlap, entangle, or collide.

The exhibition takes its title from a new body of work in which Solar Abboud reflects on interior processes of growth, pressure, and restructuring. Here, the body is understood less as a biological condition and more as a metaphor for inward transformation, a site where rupture and repair coexist. Vessels become bodies, and bodies become vessels; matter reorganises itself from within, opening abstraction to forms of embodied agency and imaginative possibility.

Born in 1985 in Madrid to an Egyptian mother and a Spanish father, Solar Abboud works across large-scale sculpture, drawing, and video. Her practice views material forms as continuously transforming, oscillating between organic and synthetic, interior and exterior qualities. Rather than reinforcing binaries, these dynamics suggest a fluid, non-dualistic understanding of matter and its behaviours.

In recent years, Solar Abboud has gained significant international visibility, with major solo exhibitions at MACBA(Barcelona), a large-scale installation on The High Line (New York), and, most recently, a prominent commission at the Hayward Gallery (London). Her work is also represented in leading museum collections, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Madrid), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Colección Fundación Botín (Santander), CA2M – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), Colección MAEC – Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación (Madrid), Colección Fundación Coca-Cola (Madrid), and FRAC Corsica (France), among others— underscoring the expanding reach and resonance of her practice.