ART CITIES:Milan-Leonor Antunes
Engaging with the histories of 20th Century architecture, design and art, the work of Leonor Antunes reflects on the functions of everyday objects, contemplating the potential of Modernist forms to be materialized as sculptures. Antunes investigates the coded values and invisible flow of ideas embedded within objects, transforming them into reimagined abstract structures.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pirelli HangarBicocca Archive
Borrowing from vernacular traditions of craftsmanship from locations such as South America, Mexico and Portugal, Leonor Antunes seeks to understand the construction principles behind rational designs, as well as the process of abstracting reality through its reduction to geometry. The grid, present in most of the art works, objects and buildings she references, finds itself transformed into brass nets, interlaced and knotted strings, leather straps and bands of cotton threads hand-woven on looms. . Details are extracted, measurements are recalculated, and connections between artists resurface in ways that conflate physical, measurable experience with the effects of memory and time. There is an intimacy inherent in her resolutely handcrafted forms as they cover the floor, hang from the ceiling, block a direct path, and light the room. Milan and its rich Modernist tradition, in particular the work of architects Franca Helg and Franco Albin , are the source of great inspiration for Leonor Antunes’ first major solo exhibition, “The last days in Galliate”, that is conceived as a complex site-specific installation that fills the entire space of Shed in Pirelli HangarBicocca. The works, many of which are new productions, converse with the context structural elements and natural lighting, thus merging in a single narrative. The title of the exhibition, refers to the artist’s research into the work of Franca Helg, alluded to in the name of the place overlooking Lake Varese and the Alpine foothills, where Helg had planned and built a family house for her parents and the place where she was to spend the final years of her life. However, the title also refers to another Avant-Garde figure, the Cuban designer Clara Porset who spent the last years of her life in the Chimalistac district of Mexico City—whose research was at the core of a former exhibition Antunes held at the Kunsthalle in Basel in 2013, titled “The last days in chimalistac”. The artist weaves tales with the cultural heritage of companies as Pirelli and Olivetti and the projects realized with the manufacturing house Vittorio Bonacina, active in the production of furniture and other items made with rattan and rattan-core. The exhibition space is transformed by an intervention that covers the floor with a linoleum intarsia, inspired by a design by Anni Albers (who left Germany with her husband Josef Albers in 1933 to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina), whose colors hark back to the iconic floor designed by the architect and designer Gio Ponti realized in 1960 for the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan.
Info: Curator: Roberta Tenconi, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Via Chiese 2, Milan, Duration: 14/9-13/1/18, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 10:00-22:00, www.hangarbicocca.org
