Completely uncomfortable, but stunningly beautiful

With its ornate wall panels, and furniture-like objects transforming the Portuguese Leonor Antunes halls and meeting rooms in enchanting, open spaces. The often-to-ceiling installations, and the loosely distributed in the space sculptures are mostly related to modernist furniture design, as it was designed by Clara Porset in Mexico, Charlotte Perriand in France or Franca Helg in Italy.

Antunes’ works, which are made of wood, metal, textile, rubber and paper, have a craft, fine-grinding, equal. In 1972, the Lisbon-born and Berlin-based artist, does not work, if it is even as a weaver or a seamstress, with specialized craftsmen, the individual pieces of outstanding quality.

Leonor Antunes, winner of the Zurich Art Price 2019. Photo: Nick Ash

Last year, the artist, for her Installation "The Last Days in Galliate was celebrated" in the huge hangar of the Pirelli hangar Bicocca in Milan by the Italian art criticism. The many-voiced and permeable area of art that is reminiscent of a sparse forest, is currently visible in the Fondation Beyeler to. There it is the culmination of one of Theodora Vischer, curated group exhibition with the title of "Resonating Spaces".

In the "Last Days in Galliate" – the title refers to the place in Milan, where the designer Franca Helg (1920-1989) was at the end of your life – to move the visitor in a spatial continuum, the orbits of a transparent wall of black-and-white-and-gold paper and four different types of sculptures is characterized. In addition to high stilts made of dark wood, the floor-to-ceiling, hanging spoon-like objects made of wicker and bent tubes and pipes of brass, which are reminiscent of brass instruments. For this spiral to remain in the shape of cable, which are surrounded by a grey substance, in a state of unstable equilibrium.

room view from the Fondation Beyeler, where Leonor Antunes' Installation "The Last Days in Galliate" is issued. Photo: Stefan Altenburger

all in All, a total work of art, designed with natural materials and colors, its strains, and stretches, and his surreal acting forms (remember, more or less, to designs by Franca Helg), such a seductive force, that you would like to leave the courtroom for a little more.

To works of art, coagulated furniture

Leonor Antunes last year was awarded the Zurich Art Prize, which is awarded by the city of Zurich, but from the insurance company of the same Name, and with 100’000 Swiss francs, is doped. 20’000 Swiss francs, will go to the artist, during 80’000 Swiss francs in the sense of institutions sponsoring for the benefit of the Haus Konstruktiv . The Museum displays two large rooms Antunes’ sculptures, which seem like works of art, coagulated furniture.

Why? Because the furniture lost in the course of an elaborate artistic Research all your functionality. Also, if between bent and carefully polished, oiled wood would make frame, the tube in any civil living a good figure, professional weaving of rushes are clamped. On these objects, no one can sit or lie down.

a tribute to Charlotte Perriand: a view of the exhibition at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv. Photo: Nick Ash

In the upper room Antunes related’ Work on the industrial design of furniture and lamps of the French Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), which is currently being celebrated with a major exhibition at the Museum of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Of Perriand, who worked closely with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret also, the now famous Le Corbusier lounger designed, assumes Antunes, the characteristic bends of your usually made of metal sculpted furniture and lamp designs.

on The ground floor recall the objects to the chairs and loungers by Clara Porset, a major Mexican designer of the 20th century. Century, who lived from 1895 to 1981. For Antunes, the search for traces in the history of design as a feminist project, in particular, are Porsets rattan furniture of interest. She makes the useful furniture gestural sculptures.

the exhibition at The Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich will take up to 12. In January, those in the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen to 26. January.

Created: 13.11.2019, 14:19 PM