Opening reception with artist: March 5, 6–8 PM
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Night Crawler, a presentation of new and recent work by Spanish artist Teresa Solar Abboud, her first since joining the gallery in 2025. Born in Madrid, Solar Abboud’s practice explores transformation and interrelation through sculptural groupings and morphological interventions that build surreal, hybrid worlds. Solar Abboud’s work situates itself at the interstices of opposing ideas, finding productive tension in the false dichotomies between the organic and industrial, the animal and mechanical, and the ancient and futuristic. Night Crawler coincides with Solar Abboud’s outdoor installation Mother Tongue, currently on view at the Hayward Gallery in London, as well as Self-Portrait as a Pregnant Woman at Kunstverein Hannover, Germany. The exhibition follows the artist’s site-specific commission for the High Line in New York in 2024. A major solo exhibition of Solar Abboud’s work will debut at Lehmann Maupin London this October, concurrent to Frieze London.
In Night Crawler, Solar Abboud transforms the entirety of the gallery space, drenching the walls and floor in a muted green to draw viewers into dialogue with her sculptures. At the center of the exhibition is the large-scale Tunnel Boring Machine (2023), a 14-foot long work from the artist’s series of the same name. The Tunnel Boring Machines (or Tuneladoras) are composed of hand-shaped, high-temperature clay, from which large, elongated resin forms emerge. Washed in swathes of saturated color, these dual appendages echo fins, pincers, or beaks, in stark contrast to the organic materiality of the form from which they originate. The works highlight Solar Abboud’s abiding interest in hybridity, and are marked by an uncanny strangeness that challenges the relationship between form and function.
The Tunnel Boring Machines also seek to compress time across geological ages, from the primordial to the postmodern. Here and throughout Solar Abboud’s practice, clay plays a pivotal role as a metaphor for the unknown. Inspired by excavation machines used to tunnel under our feet and through mountains, Solar Abboud’s works combine her hyper-modern visual language with the raw, geological material that these machines displace.
Alongside the Tunnel Boring Machine is a smaller piece from the artist’s Undifferentiated Sexual State (2026) series. Here, predominantly clay forms reveal bright, polished interiors, recalling the smooth interior of a shell. Their title comes from a phase in embryonic development that occurs prior to sexual differentiation. Defined by fluidity and possibility, the sculptures embody pre-resolved states, inhabiting a liminal space in which their potential futures are boundless. Moreover, these sculptures gesture toward the generative potential of a woman’s gestational body, underscoring a central theme in Solar Abboud’s practice.
Night Crawler also features a new work on paper, To Become Food (2026). The work belongs to Solar Abboud’s mind maps, which visualize the artist’s process through free-form compositions of interconnected words, symbols, and images. Here, viewers witness ideas form, shift, connect, and double back. The artist’s mind maps offer a window into the conceptual realm of her practice, where it becomes clear that each sculpture has a life and history of its own. The title of this work references consumption and disposal, raising questions about how information is absorbed, transformed, and discarded. In Night Crawler, we begin to understand the complexity of Solar Abboud’s practice—one concerned with the construction of a total material, conceptual, and linguistic environment.
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