Leonor Antunes
Leonor Antunes, born in Lisbon in 1972, explores the history of modern art, design and architecture in her artistic practice. Central to her work are the transformation of materials and forms and the processes through which they are made: Antunes is interested in local craft traditions, places of production and the people involved in creating a work. She works with materials including wood, brass, cork, leather and glass, allowing their specific properties to directly inform her work. In 2019, Antunes represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale. Her work has been shown at institutions including Mudam Luxembourg, MASP in São Paulo, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Antunes lives and works in Berlin.
For the exhibition Innenleben at Haus der Kunst, Leonor Antunes collaborated with Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg in 2019 to create A set of tools by Günter Löscher, her first work in porcelain. The starting point was a series of individually made tools belonging to Günter Löscher, a longstanding craftsman at the manufactory. Antunes translated these functional objects into porcelain and enlarged them by 20 per cent – a deliberate reversal of the shrinkage that porcelain undergoes during firing. Originally made of wood and metal, the tools lose their function through this transformation and become sculptures. Their painted surfaces reproduce both the different materials and the traces left by decades of use. In this way, Antunes places not only the tools themselves but also the craftsmanship and the people behind the production of Nymphenburg porcelain at the centre of the work.
