Leonor Antunes
Her Discrepancies with Oaxacan textile (2)
Discrepancies with Oaxacan Textile II by Leonor Antunes is a hanging sculpture composed of three elements made of brass. This sculptural work was originally produced for the exhibition Discrepancies with Clara Porset (2018) at Museo Tamayo, which featured reassembled objects from early 20th century Cuban designer Clara Porset. Antunes’s work explores Mexican traditions through a contemporary context. The brass pieces are “woven” in a grid-like shape, as Oaxacan textiles typically are, referring to their design process; counterpoising notions of modernity and the memory of manual production. By means of re-elaborating existing objects, Antunes illustrates other ways of seeing and thinking about those objects and tries to explain their existence, persistence, or disappearance.
Leonor Antunes’s sculptures consider and reinterpret 20th century design, architecture, and modernist art, focusing in particular on work created by women. Paying tribute to craftsmanship, especially from South and Central America and Portugal, Antunes aims to preserve and convey traditional knowledge. After exhaustive research, her practice starts from existing elements, which she decontextualizes and transforms, through layers of historical references. Materiality and form are central issues in her work; she uses natural, organic materials, which show the passage of time, such as rope, wood or brass. These are interwoven as a metaphor for the interweaving of space and time, similar to a textile. Her interest lies in the importance of the materia as well as the context, appraising the dialogue between the works and their architectural space.