Leonor Antunes. the last days in Galliate

Through her sculptures Leonor Antunes (Lisbon, 1972) reinterprets the history of art, design, and architecture of the twentieth century, and in particular the Modernist tradition, in its most radical and experimental instances.

Thanks to a meticulous research into several projects and works, Antunes, after selecting specific details and fragments, transforms them into new forms and elegant artworks. For her sculptures Antunes prefers to use natural and organic materials on which the traces of time passing remain visible—rope, wood, leather, brass, rubber, and cork, among others—employing artisanal and vernacular techniques in clear opposition to mass production, in an ongoing attempt to preserve and hand down knowledge and traditional skills.

“the last days in Galliate” is the first major exhibition in Italy of the work of Leonor Antunes, conceived as a complex site-specific installation that fills the 1,400 square meters of the space known as the Shed in Pirelli HangarBicocca: the works, many of which are new productions, converse with the context structural elements and natural lighting, thus merging in a single narrative.

The Shed is transformed by an intervention that covers the floor with a linoleum intarsia, inspired by a design by artist Anni Albers (1899-1994), whose colours hark back to the iconic floor designed by the architect and designer Gio Ponti (1891-1979), realized in 1960 for the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan.