The first monograph to be published on the work of Leonor Antunes, villa, how to use is released in association with the exhibition Antunes conceived for the Serralves Villa in 2011. The result of a close collaboration between the artist and graphic designer Conny Purtill, this fully-illustrated publication includes installation views of Antunes' exhibition (which featured works produced by the artist over the past decade alongside pieces specifically created for the Villa spaces), as well as five essays that offer an in-depth survey on Antunes' art.
Dieter Roelstraete highlights the speculative concerns that, under the blanket term architecture, Antunes shares with the three most important German-speaking philosophers of the twentieth century (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Adorno): identity and belonging, homeliness and uprootedness, measures and proportion, space and balance. Taking the case study of Manhattan's Park Avenue after WWII, Maria Berman examines the theme of duplication in architecture. Doris van Drathen finds in Leonor Antunes' work the use of “measurement” as a tool of grasping the world. Nuria Enguita Mayo addresses the problems of duplication, faktura and restriction, while Ricardo Nicolau reflects on the dialogue of the artist with the architecture of the Serralves Villa and the memory of other buildings from the history of modernism.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Serralves Villa, Porto, in 2011.
Born 1972 in Lisbon, Leonor Antunes lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions were presented at CAPC (Bordeaux), Tensta konsthall (Stockholm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo Tamayo et Museo Experimental El Eco (Mexico), Pérez Art Museum (Miami), Kunsthalle Basel, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Museu de Serralves (Porto), Museo Nacional Reina Sofia ( Madrid), Credac (Ivry-sur-Seine)... Her work has also been included in a number of international group exhibitions, including the 12th Sharjah Biennial, UAE, and the 8th Berlin Biennial, and has recently been exhibited in venues such as the Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), CNEAI (Chatou), and MIT List Visual Arts Center (2012).
