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In Leonor Antunes’s present “the obvious size of a ground space,” guests wander slowly beneath and between a wealthy array of textures and methods that commemorate ladies designers ignored by the modernist canon. Antunes has titled every work to accredit its dedicatee, usually utilizing their first names in a playful nod to the historic trivialization of feminine artists. A collection of low tables in glazed ceramic and lacquered wooden, “Charlottes,” 2021, relies on an unrealized design by Charlotte Perriand. In Sadie & Sophie # 2, 2023, talismans of wooden and beaded yarn pay homage to British architect Sadie Speight and Swiss artist-designer Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Cork flooring inlaid with coloured linoleum invoke Thirties rug designs by British architect and designer Marian Pepler, whereas in Lena #9, 2023, the signature motifs of Bauhaus designer Lena Bergner are echoed in gauzy brass wire draped over a metallic beam. Such elegant abstractions are additionally acts of translation: Tufted wool turns into cork and lino, handrails are transfigured as hanging sculptures, and are thus reinscribed as Antunes’s work.
But for all their tasteful restraint and lovely manufacturing values, Antunes’s associative objects additionally summon much less high-brow impressions: Her ropes and chains might be the supersized props of a fetishist; the bamboo frames and nets, constructions of a bespoke tree-top journey or modernist playground. Ladies artists past modernism are additionally recalled in works akin to Franca (#5), 2018, whose rattan and hemp rope bear traces of Sheila Hicks’s “thread-things,” Lenore Tawney’s sculptural “woven kinds,” or a tauter, tighter manifestation of what Glenn Adamson described because the “hippy, furry” aesthetic and “wonky flaccidity” of Nineteen Sixties Fiber Artwork. The cork ground is the set up’s stand-out ingredient. Referencing conventional supplies of Antunes’s native Portugal and midcentury modernist interiors, it’s heat and tactile underfoot, remodeling the area and unifying the hanging sculptural works that attain and fall towards it.
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