Leonor Antunes Knihy

Engaging the histories of art, architecture, and design, Leonor Antunes reflects on the functions of everyday objects, contemplating their potential to be materialized as abstract sculptures. She investigates the values and ideas embedded in things as well as in vernacular traditions and craft. Over the last two years, the artist has researched postwar figures active in Venice, Milan, and Turin who had a predominant role in postwar reconstruction as well as how craftsmanship traditions, associated with particular forms of knowledge and making, intersect with this history. Accompanying Antunes's exhibition in the Portuguese Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, a seam, a surface, a hinge, or a knot features texts by Briony Fer, Suzanne Cotter, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and curator João Ribas, as well as an artist's project of approximately twenty die-cut sheets based on drawings in the archive of Egle Trincanato, an architect, writer, photographer, and curator who worked in Venice. Exhibition: 58th Venice Biennale, Portuguese Pavilion, Venice, Italy (14.05. - 24.11.2019)

The exhibition by Leonor Antunes at Kunsthalle Basel in 2013, titled the last days in chimalistac, was the first comprehensive presentation of the Portuguese artist in Switzerland. Within her practice she engages with the history of 20th century architecture, design and art and creates complex but fragile installations and sculptures out of metal, leather, finest woods, and nets. This accompanying publication focuses on the visual representation of Antunes’s work, and points out the fragility and beauty of the material itself. An essay by Kunsthalle Basel director and curator Adam Szymczyk introduces the backdrop, the hidden protagonists, among other Clara Porset, Anni Albers or Lina Bo Bardi, and talks about the practice practice of Antunes, how she reconstructs basic ideas and highlights not only the form but the politics that come with it.

the tiny pliable plane is an artists’s edition by Leonor Antunes conceived for BOM DIA KINDER on the occasion of her exhibition the pliable plane at CAPC Contemporary Art Museum of Bordeaux. Borrowing its title from Anni Albers’s 1957 essay The Pliable Plane Antunes occupied the monumental exhibition space with a series of large scale works, two sculptures inspired by Anni Albers’s fabric designs, others informed with Lina Bo Bardi’s architectural work. Close-up images of these and other works are printed with silkscreen on a variation of papers and allow a joyful play with layers of transparency.