Leonor Antunes: discrepancies with E.S. (extended)

Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to present discrepancies with W.W. (extended), an exhibition of new works by Leonor Antunes. This exhibition marks Antunes’s second solo show with the gallery. Notably, discrepancies with W.W. (extended) was developed in conjunction with discrepancies with E.S. (in company), a complementary and off-site exhibition curated by Douglas Fogle at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles.

Antunes takes an immersive approach to her subjects, transposing historical forms and precise measures based on deep archival research on artists and modernist histories—often of female protagonists, in order to create sculptures and site-specific interventions. Her work draws on a wide range of sources, lexicons and materials – whether drawing in space with lines and form, exploring the choreographies of volume and movement, the potential of craft or the grid, or the gravity and torsion of objects in space. In celebration of admired and often marginalized stories of people and of time, Antunes embraces participation—fusing her own work with lost histories as a way to reimagine the present and honor the past.

Here, Antunes’s work explores the legacy of an influential twentieth-century female pioneer whose innovations contributed significantly to modernist art, design, and architecture, but were overlooked because these fields have historically been male-dominated. Antunes studied Elizabeth (née Scheu) Close (1912-2011), a modern architect who was born in Vienna and raised in a home designed by Adolf Loos, where her family hosted prominent artists, architects and designers, including members of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) and family friend Richard Neutra. Close went on to receive her graduate degree in architecture at MIT and spent the majority of her career designing hundreds of homes and public buildings in Minneapolis while serving as head architect to the University of Minnesota. Antunes was drawn to Close’s relationship to Viennese modernism as well as her pragmatic, unadorned approach to design, and found an affinity to her frequent use of locally sourced, natural materials.

Presented throughout the Main Gallery, the works in this exhibition embrace applied arts and traditional craft practices from around the world that highlight natural materials such as rope, leather, and glass. The back wall of the gallery showcases an 80-foot-long span of two separate bodies of work made from brass and beads. These works are based on historical textile and loom-based patterns that the artist sourced from the archives of the Wiener Werkstätte, Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), and the Vienna School for Arts and Crafts. Antunes uses these as templates to determine the structure of her works, which at once correspond directly to their original source and yet, when hung vertically with the pull of gravity turning the sculpture into a different shape each time it is installed, become autonomous, fluctuating forms unto themselves.

Creating a dialogue with the architecture of the space, a commanding installation of ropes, coupled with hanging works in leather, adjoin the space between the floor and rafters. The use of rope, initially inspired by a staircase of architect Ernö Goldfinger, becomes an expanded “screen” in this intervention that determines how the viewer navigates and views the space. A surrounding series of floor lamps configured to the various heights of the staff at the gallery, subsequently merging into abstract figures, are extrapolated from a table lamp design originally produced by the Wiener Werkstätte. Through a proposition that reimagines rational, modern design into sculpture, Antunes’s practice embeds the history of a recovered past with radical social and political determinations into objects of both study and poetry in the new century.

The complementary exhibition, discrepancies with E.S. (in company), will open at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences on Friday, 5 September from 5-7pm and will remain on view through 13 December 2025. A special performance by Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson, titled Music for Changing Light, featuring her own music as well as OCCAM III by Éliane Radigue, will be presented on opening night at 6pm. Please note that the Neutra VDL is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am -3 pm and is located at 2300 Silver Lake Blvd in Los Angeles. For more information on reservations, tickets, and tours of the Neutra VDL, please visit their website at neutra-vdl.org.