Measurement, material, memory and site are the key ingredients of the artist Leonor Antunes’s elegantly minimal sculptural installations. For “assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously,” her first solo exhibition at Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles (through May 12), the Berlin artist visited and studied several important architectural sites in São Paulo, Brazil; Turin, Italy; and Porto, Portugal. She then translated her research — and the measurements she took at each site — into a series of floor, wall, hanging and standing works that themselves create new spaces within the gallery.
The title Antunes has given to her show is also the name of its largest sculpture, an open pavilion of meticulously made walnut posts and beams. Two works hang from the pavilion’s canopy like screens or curtains. The parquet floor of the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 “Glass House” in São Paulo was the inspiration for “lina,” a delicate construction of brass tubes and silver wire. “Chao” is a 12-part hand-knotted gridded series of delicate black nets that recall the fishing nets used in Antunes’s native Portugal.
Handwork is an essential element of Antunes’s sculpture, and she often incorporates traditional craft techniques, like the hand-knotted nets of “chao,” into her work to recall not only the gradual disappearance of these techniques but also the places in which they were used. A tangle of handmade black leather straps, called “random intersections #7,” tumbles from the rafters of the gallery ceiling and refers to horse bridles and the memory of the Società Ippica Torinese, Carlo Mollino’s equestrian school in Turin, which was built in 1937 but destroyed in 1960.
By mining the details of the places she has visited, Antunes extends and extracts their architectural components, rethinking and reconfiguring their formal elements, changing and collapsing them to make new and magical spaces.