Teresa Lanceta

Originating from sound production, the word glitch may also be used to describe minor disturbances within digital images. While these errors sometimes result from sloppy coding or technological malfunctions, they can appear as a deliberate disintegration of or break from a pattern.

Barcelona-born artist Teresa Lanceta foregrounds this kind of intentional interruption in her practice. Curated by Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez, the exhibition “Weaving as Open Source” gathers more than two hundred of Lanceta’s works dating from the 1970s to the present, including rugs, tapestries, fabrics, drawings, photographs, and videos. One of the artist’s more recent pieces, Hospital, 56, 2019, features an uneven swath of black, gray, and red zigzags imposed over the visual static of horizontal lines in shades of cornflower blue, slate, and a melonlike pink. The work is named after the address of a fifteenth-century hospice that later served as the art academy where Lanceta taught in El Raval, the heart of Barcelona. One of the most densely populated parts of the city, this neighborhood was Lanceta’s home for a long time and, much like the artist’s numerous stays with the Berber women of the Middle Atlas in Morocco, formative for her practice. The narrow streets and vivid collage of cultures and languages find echoes in the density of the textures, patterns, and palettes the artist translates into her weavings. There, as in El Raval, imperfections are the order; so-called glitches provide the structure.

— Franz Thalmair