The Brooklyn Rail

Over the course of some five decades, Spanish artist Teresa Lanceta has nurtured a textile-making practice that interlaces lived experience with aesthetic legacies that criss-cross between the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco, tacitly linking art to craft. Tracing the threads, I find you at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins presents the artist’s substantial weavings of wool and cotton, striated in dense colors, along with painted fabrics embroidered with hermetic signs and works on paper informed by centuries-old traditions of ornamentation and iconography. The artist’s first gallery show in the United States, this exhibition encapsulates an oeuvre sustained by rigorous inquiry and experimental play. Ebullient in design and texture, Lanceta’s work honors encoded narratives of gendered labor, advancing them into the present.

In LLUVIA EN SEVILLA (1987), a large-scale tapestry woven from wool, cotton, viscose, and taffeta fabric, vertical waves of blue, cyan, and gray extend from a navy sky onto zigzags of yellow and red. The loom is not the easiest tool with which to represent landscape, but Lanceta’s juxtaposed colors and sharp lines create an abstracted view of Seville, where Lanceta lived in the 1970s, complete with an ochre-toned ovoid indicating La Maestranza, the city’s bull-fighting ring, and the Triana Bridge beyond it. Cerulean bands invoking sky and sea run along the top and bottom of Azul (1992), a large wistful tapestry created after Lanceta left the Canary Islands, where she also lived for a time. In the center of the composition, yellow and red triangles—mountains? sails?—rise from watery blue waves. Along the bottom of Azul, a row of concentric circles—aojos, or evil eye symbols—ensure protection from malevolent forces. Discernable as Lanceta’s representations may be, they additionally echo a language of symbols developed by Berber weavers, who were often women, in which triangles indicate fertility and womanhood and waves and zigzags represent water, movement, the flow of life.

In LA ETERNIDAD HUMANA. LEONOR DE PLANTEGENET #2 (2024), Lanceta relinquishes the measured, rectangular shape of her larger-scale work, using a more free-form weaving process to yield a long, uneven band of fabric (approximately 80 by 23 inches) akin to a scarf or a shroud. Named for Eleanor of England, the twelfth century Plantagenet Queen Consort of Castile and Toledo, mother of at least ten children, and alleged fashionista, the work is woven in muted rows of silver and white broken by a band of red striping and a cluster of seven heptagrams, seven-pointed stars associated with the seven days of creation and often used to ward off evil. Triangles of red and brown run in diagonals across the top two-thirds of the tapestry GEOMETRÍA TEJIDA #2 (1992), while below a field of pale blue holds an hourglass, an evil eye, a pyramid, and other geometric forms commonly found in Islamic decorative art. At Lanceta’s request, the work hangs from the ceiling in the middle of the gallery, allowing visitors to see both recto and verso sides of the tapestry, the latter revealing the tangle of yarn and knots that document the artist’s process, mistakes and all.

Alongside her weaving, Lanceta works with painted fabrics sutured together or embroidered with contrasting threads in processes that run counter to the patience of the loom. Three works from her “El Raval” Series, produced in 2019 and 2020, recall the dark, narrow lanes of the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona, which was densely populated by migrant Romani families when Lanceta first lived there in the 1970s. Swatches of cloth in varying sizes painted by the artist and connected together by neat stitches of thick yarn form abstracted memoirs of the streets she travelled, the people she met, and the joy and despair she encountered. Four works from her 2024 “CON SUMO CUIDADO” series, each named for their predominant color, feature lengths of painted fabric onto which Lanceta embroiders circles and squares, chains and crosses. In CON SUMO CUIDADO. PÚRPURA (2024), Lanceta’s hand can be felt wandering across a sheet of violet fabric, embellishing it with half-formed shapes and clusters of thread in an improvisation of unplanned stitches.

Lanceta returns to Islamic-inspired designs in her colored-pencil drawings, which allude to alfombras (rugs) made on the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century. Tessellated shapes filled with repeating signs and symbols form meticulous compositions, each cell a study in the region’s history and iconographic past. In ANUNCIADA (2025), a field of blue and yellow diamonds are inset with a perspective drawing—like a secret little niche built into a wall—of red, black, and yellow tiles. The repetition of shapes is mesmerizing, as is the trick of perception they create. But as with all things the artist makes, there is more. Stand for a moment, and the figure in the carpet emerges. In this case, it’s a line drawing of a woman, barely visible at first glance but copied from an old photograph Lanceta found—the identity of its subject is now lost to time but their presence endures.