COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MUSEO TAMAYO/PHOTO: NICK ASH
Portugal has tapped the Lisbon-born, Berlin-based artist Leonor Antunes for its pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, which will run from May 11 through November 24.
Antunes’s work tends to toward a strain of Post-Minimal sculpture and installation that is informed by histories of architecture and design as well as traditional crafts. What does she have planned for Venice, a place rich in all those things? Here’s a bit of the official announcement:
The exhibition’s point of departure is Antunes’s significant research into key figures in the cultural history of Venice, such as the architects and designers Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, and Franca Helg, as well as the legacies of the patronage of Savina Masieri and architecture of Egle Trincanato, who were both active in the city in the postwar period.
João Ribas, who stepped down as director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto last year, will serve as curator of the show, “Leonor Antunes: a seam, a surface, a hinge, or a knot,” which will be housed at the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin. The official commissioner is the Directorate-General for the Arts of Portugal’s Ministry of Culture.
Antunes will arrive in Venice fresh off a string of recent one-person shows, at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (in 2018), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2017), Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm (2017), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016).