View of the exhibition Leonor Antunes: the last days in Chimalistac at Kunsthalle Basel, 2013
Courtesy Leonor Antunes and Kunsthalle Basel, photo: Nick Ash
These sculptures bring together traditional crafts and modernist architectural forms, reflecting on how materials can divide and articulate space
Leonor Antunes uses materials associated with artisanal traditions, such as leather, rope, brass and wood, which she combines into installations with an architectural presence. She turns linear or flat threads, rods and slats into three-dimensional grids and panels. These are then suspended from the ceiling, often from structures that provide a horizontal hanging framework.
Her works frequently reference the legacy of early 20th-century modernism, particularly through the work of women practitioners whose contributions have long been overlooked. These include Anni Albers (1899–1994), Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) and Lygia Clark (1920–1988), among others. The sources for works in this display are Portuguese architect Nuno Teotónio Pereira (1922–2016) and Bauhaus-trained German textile designer Lena Meyer-Bergner (1906–1981).
assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously I – mesh is made of two separate works, which the artist later combined into a new single installation. As the title implies, elements of Antunes’s works can be re-configured and brought together differently each time they are displayed. This allows us to reflect on the changeable nature of her sculptures and the materials used to build them.
Similarly, Antunes has assembled discrepancies with T.P. (II) – random intersections #29 and #31 – Lena #8.1 by bringing together components made at different times. The sculpture is laid out in a way that directly responds to the room’s architecture, exploring how objects and soft surfaces can shape the spaces we inhabit.
Rudolf Stingel, Untitled 1993
Untitled was first exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 as a part of Aperto '93, a section of the Biennale devoted to new tendencies in art and emerging artists. It consists of a wall 5.2 x 9 m in area, entirely covered with orange Savannah custom colour carpeting. Viewers are invited to mould and sculpt the 1.5 cm thick pile of the carpet, facilitating an experience of the work that is both tactile and visual. One in a series of carpet-based works made by Stingel in the early 1990s, Untitled challenges the limits of the materials traditionally used to create a painting. Stingel’s practice engages in a formal and conceptual analysis of the medium of painting. By employing such unlikely materials as carpeting, Styrofoam, and aluminium-coated panelling, he presents three-dimensionality as symbolic of painting itself. The interactive quality of the carpet works is integral to the artist’s conception of a painting, as he explains in his statement that, ‘[he allows] painting, but not by [his] assistants who carry out [his] concept but by a public that inscribes its own individual response in a material way into the work’ (quoted in Rainer Zittl, ‘The Trickster’, in Bonami, p.35).
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artworks in Leonor Antunes
Art in this room
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
1993