NEW YORK, NY.- Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is presenting Tracing the threads, I find you, a solo exhibition of work by Spanish artist Teresa Lanceta. This is Lanceta’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery, her first gallery show in the United States, and her first solo exhibition in New York. Tracing the threads, I find you is on view through May 17.
Working since the 1970s, Teresa Lanceta has developed her textile practice into a vital mode of epistemological inquiry and collaboration. She views weaving as an “open source” language with the capacity to transmit ancestral knowledge and techniques. Her work is grounded in the physical structure of the woven form; she does not follow specific patterns or outlines but allows a gestural intuition and the binary logic of warp and weft to guide her time spent at the loom. Building upon one another, the successive weaves culminate in unique, unscripted conversations of color and thread.
As a structural process manifesting across diverse textile traditions, Lanceta sees in weaving the radical potential to challenge the presupposed, conventional boundaries between art and craft, utility and aesthetics, and authenticity and iteration. Lanceta’s experiences living and working with nomadic communities in Barcelona’s Raval district and in the Middle Atlas region of Morocco furthered her interest in gendered labor, anonymous collectivity, and non-verbal narratives. These reciprocal engagements are foundational to the collective, research-based perspective that guides her methodology.
Tracing the threads, I find you includes works from the 1980s through 2024, mapping out an intertwined chronology of life and art. The exhibition will feature early large-scale weavings, drawings inspired by the fifteenth-century alfombras (rugs) of the Iberian Peninsula, sewn tapestries from Lanceta's 2019-20 El Raval series, and a collection of recent painted and stitched canvases.
Concurrent with her exhibition at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, Lanceta’s work is being featured in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, opening at The Museum of Modern Art on April 20. The traveling group exhibition was curated by Lynne Cooke at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and was previously shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023-24), the National Gallery of Art (2024), and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2024-25). The Museum of Modern Art presentation is organized by Esther Adler, Curator, with Emily Olek, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawing and Prints, and Paul Galloway, Collection Specialist, Department of Architecture and Design.
