Künstlerhaus Bethanien

Leonor Antunes’ work resembles a stock-taking of the places where she lives and works. She makes precisely observed motifs and details into the basis for fragments - reproduced to-scale -, which she then separates from their function and context in order to develop them into her autonomous, filigree sculptures.
In Berlin, Antunes has been particularly interested in the doubling of many public buildings and institutions that existed in the once divided halves of the city. In each case, she selected the building that was constructed at a later date, and so chose an architectonic detail from the Academy of the Arts, the New National Gallery, the Museum of Applied Arts, the State Library and the Television Tower to serve as sources for her sculptural work.

In her own words, the artist is interested in details of architecture that reinforce the architectural structure of the building. The citations take on the form of geometric kits, whereby Antunes applies a so-called "Geometric Construction Apparatus", which was used as teaching material in geometry lessons during the 1950s and 60s. Autonomous reflections of the architectural environment that surrounds and influences us as everyday living space thus emerge through the conflicting fields of reproduction and transformation, scale-replica and de-functionalising.