Teresa Lanceta: Tracing the threads, I find you

Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present Tracing the threads, I find you, a solo exhibition of work by Spanish artist Teresa Lanceta, on view from April 12 through May 17, 2025. 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. A public opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, April 12, from 6–8pm.

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, tracing an intertwined chronology of life and art. Lanceta first visited to Morocco in the early ’80s with the anthropologist Bert Flint, and there discovered the collective, time-honored techne of the Berber women weavers. She was drawn specifically to the Middle Atlas tradition for its greater degree of textile abstraction and plurality of woven forms—including the diamond grid, the void, the zigzag, and the rhombus. Triangular and rhomboid structures in particular remain fundamental to Lanceta’s compositions, as a metaphor for openness, mobility, and expanding horizons. Her earlier large-scale tapestries LLUVIA EN SEVILLA (1987) and YUTE (1987) integrate the hermetic geometry and abstracted repetition of Middle Atlas weavings with figurative motifs to invoke an alternate, centerless imagining of space and time.

Form and structure as an entry into history was not limited to the woven medium. Lanceta’s colored pencil drawings engage the lineage of the Islamic-inspired alfombras (rugs) of the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century and the interaction of ornamentation with socioreligious dynamics. The Mudéjar artisans who remained in the Peninsula following the Reconquista developed a unique decorative language from the syncretism of Moorish styles and patterning with the heraldic motifs of their Christian patrons. Painted and drawn on paper, Lanceta’s rich, tessellated landscapes foreground ornamentation as a register of this history, while alluding to certain religious scenes and iconography.

The Raval district in Barcelona has figured profoundly in Lanceta’s life and practice, beginning in the ’70s when she first moved there and lived amongst the nomadic Romani community. Lanceta’s El Raval tapestries, produced in 2019 and 2020, became a way for the artist to translate her personal history and the social realities of the Raval into pure color and form. The angular, patchwork composition of fabrics are intercut with linear and diagonal rows of stitching that recall the streets Lanceta once frequented, the spaces encountered, the corners turned. The joining of red and black nods to the anarchist associations of CNT[1] but also fundamentally signifies the nature of the Raval itself—red as vitality and hunger, black as darkness and despair.

Lanceta’s recent works are a series of painted and stitched canvases, each titled with the “great care” of a specific color or family of colors: purple, red, and blues. Lanceta’s first body of sewn canvases emerged in the ’90s, out of her interest to explore more direct modes of picture-making and memory-keeping beyond the durational space of the loom. In her CON SUMO CUIDADO series, crisscrossed patterns, suture lines, and geometric shapes are placed within monochromatic fields of color, introducing a material complexity to the distinction between background and image.