Leonor Antunes discrepancies with W.W. (in company)

In her exhibition discrepancies with W.W. (in company) at the University Gallery of the Angewandte in the Heiligenkreuzerhof, Vienna, Leonor Antunes combines her own artistic works with objects and textiles by designers of the Wiener Werkstätte and the former k.k. Kunstgewerbeschule (Imperial and Royal School of Arts and Crafts), drawn from the Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Leonor Antunes’s interest in the historical developments and key protagonists of twentieth-century art, craft, design, and architecture serves as a potent background for her artistic practice; simultaneously, she understands her work as a tribute to women designers who have often been overlooked or marginalized within the modernist canon. Her research does not remain on a historical and theoretical level, however, rather, it involves close exchanges with professional craftsmen and women, in order to learn and develop further ways and methods of handling specific materials in her artworks. Antunes’ vast knowledge and archive of materials inform her sculptures and installations integrating materials such as rope, wood, leather and brass. The overall space and situation of an exhibition space is thereby paramount for the artist. The floor and ceiling, as well as the light source, be it natural or artificial, play as big a role as the objects shown. Antunes: “I really believe that art exists in a context, so I don’t see [my sculptures] outside of the spaces where they exist.”

In the context of Vienna, Antunes has previously delved into explorations with regards to the Wiener Werkstätte, the works by Swiss artist and designer Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) and Austrian painter, graphic and textiles designer Felice Rix-Ueno (1893-1967). In the context of the collections of the Insitut Kunstsammlung und Archiv, Antunes honed in on artists and designers such as Gudrun Baudisch, Rosa Bonom, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Mathilde Flögl, Lilly Jacobsen, Erika Giovanna Klien, Felice Rix-Ueno, Hilda Schmid-Jesser, Maria Strauss-Likarz, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky oder Vally Wieselthier. Having carefully selected objects such as ceramic and glass vases and other vessels, small pieces of furniture, as well as fabrics with geometrical patterns from the collection, Antunes has specially developed a visually multilayered display system that sits as individual islands in the space. The basis for this is a specific chair designed by French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) after a period of working in Japan in the early 1940s. Antunes is, thereby, also referencing the connection between Japanese crafts, the Wiener Werkstätte, who Rix-Ueno was a member of until 1930, working both in Kyota and Vienna. Rix-Ueno had initially spent time in Japan intermittently in the 1920s and 1930s until settling in 1949 and living there until her death in 1967. Antunes’ display consists of wooden elements, slats and round poles, that she deconstructs, adapts and extends as needed. The chair’s everyday function as a seat is, thereby, transformed into a base, a wall and hanging support in multiple ways. Further display elements are Tatami mats that the artist integrates or arranges into geometric pedestal.

Within these display clusters of works from the collection, Antunes has integrated her works from the series “Sophie” from 2024, which find their inspiration in drawings, beaded bags and necklaces by Taeuber-Arp. Intricate, geometrically patterned glass beaded strands of varying thickness and lengths intertwine with vertical white steel poles. These poles are echoed in a Antunes’ light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Verticality is furthermore found in Antunes’ standing lamps entitled “Olga”, a series that she began in 2005 and is named after her daughter. Two tubes are placed within each other: the outer sleeve is made of Plexi and corresponds to Olga’s height, while the inner, opaquely coloured tube represents Antunes’ height. Each year the artist creates a new version corresponding to Olga’s growth and the colour she chooses.

Antunes’ overall aim for her exhibition “discrepancies with W.W. (in company)” at the University Gallery of the University for Applied Arts Vienna is to bring her own artistic works into dialogue with specific objects from Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, while taking the overall idiosyncratic interior of the Heiligenkreuzerhof into consideration. Several, very specific layers of temporality, form and materiality meet here, invoking reflections on the codes of representation and the domestic, Modernism and abstraction, contemporaneity and synchronicity. Leonor Antunes thereby claims an interdisciplinary freedom for herself that she finds in the pioneering artistic practices of early 20^th century, reminding us perhaps that history lives in the present.

Leonor Antunes Biography:
Leonor Antunes (b. 1972 in Lisbon, Portugal; she lives and works in Lisbon and in Berlin, Germany) first studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon in 1992/1993. In 1993 she completed a degree in visual arts and sculpture at the Fine Arts Department of the Universidade de Lisboa and studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Germany, 1998. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her most recent solo exhibition has been “the constant inequality of leonor’s days*” at CAM-Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal in 2025. Others took place at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, Scotland (2023), Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal (2022); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2020); MASP, São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2018); Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy (2018); Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden and Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (both 2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2016); CAPC Bordeaux, France (2015); New Museum, New York (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2013); and the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2011). Antunes represented the Portuguese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Italy in 2019 and has participated in the 58th and 57th Venice Biennale (2019 and 2017); the 12th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2015); and the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014).

Image: Leonor Antunes, "Sophie and Franca" (Detail), 2024, photo by Nick Ash, courtesy of the artist