Leonor Antunes

Leonor Antunes. Walk around there. Look through here. From June 10 to September 5, 2011

Leonor Antunes, artist: I really believe that art exists in the context. My sculpture, I don’t see it like outside of the spaces where they exist or in the context where they exist. So basically the research I’m doing is to help me follow which size my sculptures have to have, like in some elements which I reproduce sometimes which exist in the space. But I always have to see it. I don’t know from photographs or images of the space. I always have to go there and measure and think of what I can make with that space.

And of course it’s also the idea that the sculptures exist in another time and in another space, but it’s also very much related to the idea of the body measuring space.
I’m more interested in the idea of proportion, which is very related with sculpture. It’s a very classical idea of proportions. But sculpture also exists in space, in the architectural space. Not only that of course. I’m very interested in the idea of measuring and the idea of the proportion in itself.

Walk around there. Look through here.

The point of departure: I started to do some research on the pavilion for the Brussels fair in 1958, which was made by two Spanish architects, Corrales and Malezún, to represent Spain. I was interested in finding a construction that was constructed in the same period when they started to think about the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was later named the Reina Sofía Museum.

I was interested in how this space started to appear. I went in search of those rooms where they started to think about the museum of contemporary art, so these were the origins of the museum we know about nowadays. It started in these meetings, it started in those spaces and that’s why I started to do some research on how the museum started.
I was interested in the pavilion, because it was the idea of a module that you can spread in the space. The idea of the pavilion was based on the hexagon. This hexagon was repeated 130 times in the space and that created this volume which we know is the pavilion.

The floor is based on two drawings the architect made of some displays inside the space, so basically the installation enlarges the drawing to the space, to the scale of the room and the hexagons have more or less the same scale as the real size. They are a bit bigger, because the space is bigger here, but it’s like 70 centimetres more. The colours of the materials are related to the colours of the drawings that they made.

I’m not interested if people know exactly what I’m searching. I think the work speaks for itself and if at some point, I hope it raises some questions. There are some people who have written about the work, so that people can also have access to it. They started to read about the work and to understand it from another perspective.