Leonor Antunes — the parallel bars — Air de Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 1 → July 13, 2012

For her second exhibition at Air de Paris, Leonor Antunes is presenting a series of new sculptures based on the measurements of specific Modernist buildings.

Works that are reversals of reversals: nothing less than taking the anti-Modernist gambit identified by Rosalind Krauss in her Notes on the Index, in 1977 — use of a referent external to the work, in contrast with Modernism’s purist rationale — and applying it to referents in the form of iconic, overtly Modernist works of architecture. Just as the artist did with the work of designer Eileen Gray in her Paris exhibition at Crédac in 2008.

The measurements for these new sculptures were taken in unrenovated apartments in the Vila de Flavio de Carvalho in São Paulo — a group of sixteen units built in 1936–38 —  and in an identically restored apartment designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens in 1927 in the Paris street now named after him.

The results are sculptures made of brass, copper, rope, leather and wood, which are part of a subtle yet clear form of protest against a certain ideal of purity and disembodiment.