Leonor Antunes

Discrepancies with S and T, 2017/2025

Sculpture Leather, nylon rope, hemp rope, brass and wooden beads Brass piece: H 165¾ x W 16½ x D ¾ in (H 421 x W 42 x D 2 cm) Leather piece: H 96½ x W 16½ in (H 245 x W 42 cm) Unique This elegant installation by Leonor Antunes brings two distinct elements into conversation: a suspended white leather panel with precise geometric cutouts, and a brass piece adorned with wooden beads. The leather work, delicately hung by hemp rope, is carefully scaled to nestle within the pool house skylight above, its minimalism echoing the rigor of architectural detail. Antunes drew inspiration for this element from a house in Zurich with sliding doors, the only residence the modernist architect Carlo Scarpa designed outside of Italy, translating the measured proportions of the wooden lattice panels into supple, softened leather material. In dialogue, the brass sculpture recalls a woven piece by Trude Guermonprez, the German-born weaver who emigrated to the U.S. during World War II. At Black Mountain College, Guermonprez carried forward and expanded the Bauhaus legacy, introducing an inventive double-weaving methods that shaped artists of the Bay Area, such as Kay Sekimachi. Antunes’s brass work, accented with wooden beads, distills these references into a sculptural form that honors Guermonprez’s influence while situating it within her own language of materials and gestures.

Leonor Antunes is a Portuguese artist based in Berlin. Her work begins with measurement—an act of observation that becomes translation. What begins as notation becomes sculpture: a record of tension, gravity, and restraint. She studies the dimensions of spaces, furniture, and architectural details, reconfiguring them into suspended forms that fall between structure and ornament. In New York, she is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery and has exhibited widely, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and the Tate, London. Antunes often engages with the legacies of women who expanded the language of modernism, including Anni Albers (1899–1994), Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), and Lygia Clark (1920–1988). By remeasuring their drawings, textiles, and designs, she translates their methods of structure, tactility, and repetition into her own sculptural vocabulary. Materials such as leather, rope, brass, and wood embody both strength and fatigue; they twist, sag, and find equilibrium over time. For Side Hustle, Antunes presents discrepancies with S and T (2017/2025), a suspended sculpture composed of leather, nylon and hemp rope, brass, and wooden beads. The work hangs from the ceiling like a fragment of architecture—structured yet pliant, defined by gravity and the tension of its own making. It extends her signature dialogue, in which she renders space through the simplest means: repetition, weight, and line.