Leonor Antunes: The Last Days in Galliate

The sculptures of the contemporary artist, who will represent Portugal at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Through her sculptures, Leonor Antunes (Lisbon, 1972) reinterprets the history of art, design, and architecture of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the Modernist tradition in its most radical and experimental instances. Thanks to meticulous research into several projects and works, Antunes selects specific details and fragments, transforming them into new forms and elegant artworks.

For her sculptures, Antunes prefers to use natural and organic materials on which the traces of time passing remain visible—rope, wood, leather, brass, rubber, and cork, among others. She employs artisanal and vernacular techniques in clear opposition to mass production, in an ongoing effort to preserve and hand down knowledge and traditional skills.

Within her practice, she engages with the history of 20th-century architecture, design, and art, creating complex but fragile installations and sculptures from metal, leather, the finest woods, and nets.

By inquiring into the meaning of everyday life objects and the social role of art and design as means of emancipation and improvement of quality of life, Leonor Antunes: The Last Days in Galliate creates a complex and stratified visual tale within the Pirelli HangarBicocca exhibition space, leading the visitor through an unedited choreography.