The Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) is currently presenting Bird Machine Dream, a solo exhibition of Madrid-based artist Teresa Solar Abboud. The show brings together a selection of the artist’s drawings and installation art that interacts with the architecture of the exhibition space to create a phantasmagoric environment for audiences. The show is the second chapter of a three-part project that began with Machine Dream Bird at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Madrid, Spain, and shall end at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino, Italy with Bird Dream Machine. Bird Machine Dream is on from November 21, 2024 – March 9, 2025, and is organised by Tania Pardo, director of CA2M, and Claudia Segura Campins, head of the MACBA collection. The curators join STIR for an interview that explores the ongoing dialogue between sculpture and drawing that the mixed media artist conducts, and sheds light on how her art should be read in relation to MACBA’s space.

The drawings also explore the fragmented condition of bodies, as well as notions surrounding hollowness, movement and emptiness. They serve as a sort of zooming in and out of the sculptures themselves. – Tania Pardo, director, CA2M and Claudia Segura Campins, head, MACBA collection

Whether flat or three-dimensional, Solar Abboud’s artworks are typified by bulbous, organic shapes. Within her watercolour works especially, one can see echoes of the type of scientific illustration work commonly found in biology and botany textbooks. When the artist extends these to physical space by way of large-scale installation pieces, the impression is magnified, leading to the feeling of walking through a room filled with strange body parts.

Looking at Solar Abboud’s Forma de fuga: Tuneladora (Escape form: Tunnel boring machine) series (2020), one will note that these forms are distinctly cavernous, and we are compelled to ask ourselves what kind of occupants may inhabit them. The common thread between the artist’s drawings and her broader body of work is that everything raises more questions than it answers, prompting us to develop our own narratives.

The curators of the Barcelona show shed light on the relationship between Abboud’s drawings and sculpture art, explaining that her shift from flat, two-dimensional representations to three-dimensional bodies should not alter our reading of her work. Pardo and Segura Campins continue, saying, “The drawings also explore the fragmented condition of bodies, as well as notions surrounding hollowness, movement and emptiness. They serve as a sort of zooming in and out of the sculptures themselves.” An interesting point is that the artist produces these drawings both before and after creating her sculptures. Therefore, they may simultaneously be read as process sketches and extensions of her installation art.

As mentioned earlier, Solar Abboud’s installations create an environment that is suggestive of alien plant and animal body parts, including in the presentation at MACBA. The Tuneladora (2024) sculptures, in particular, give the impression of giant tongues or wind-dispersed plant seeds. The curators discuss their strategy with Bird Machine Dream, telling STIR, “We worked with the design of the space in which the pieces are presented in a site-specific way, providing coherence to the narrative, with curved walls that interact with the organic and soft forms of Teresa Solar Abboud’s work.”

MACBA’s art exhibition show is an intriguing offering that gives viewers a glimpse of an alien world. We are left to make sense of a strange space and imagine its inhabitants, but we must make our peace with never truly knowing.

‘Bird Machine Dream’ is currently on view at MACBA, Barcelona, from November 21, 2024 – March 9, 2025.