Leonor Antunes, the apparent length of a floor area at Fruitmarket 24.06.23–08.10.23.

Leonor Antunes is a Portuguese artist who lives and works in Berlin. She is known for the sculptural installations that she makes in response to particular contexts and locations, working closely with the architecture of a building. Her approach to this exhibition is unusual to the extent that she has brought some older works together with the new works made especially for Fruitmarket, that touch both directly and indirectly on the work of overlooked figures, mainly women, from historical narratives of modern design and architecture.

In the ground floor gallery, there are two works from the series the homemaker and her domain. These are large bamboo structures from which the artist has suspended a number of hanging works. They have the feel of a temporary shelter or modern exhibition stand, where an array of possible techniques, forms and materials is on display. Each hanging sculpture references one of the many women designers that Antunes uses as her source material – such as architect Charlotte Perriand (from whom the title also comes) and weavers Lena Bergner, Trude Guermonprez and Michiko Yamawaki. The titles she gives the individual pieces, often using first names or initials, suggests she thinks of them as stand-ins for often marginalised craft practices as well as complex histories of migration. For example, in the face of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the Bauhaus textile designer Bergner moved first to Moscow then Mexico; the weaver Guermonprez left her home in Germany to teach at the Black Mountain College in the 1940s. These are just two examples of the many transnational stories of geographical displacement that Antunes draws upon in her work.

In the upstairs gallery, the space is much sparer. Glinting in the light and changing in response to the light levels in the room, a metal ‘weaving’ is draped over one of the existing bars that straddle the columns of the building. The effect of a metal net and the tiny links between the rods are reminiscent of Gego’s Reticulares, the installations that the Venezualan artist made in the 1960s. Antunes has actually based the pattern she used for this piece on a design for a weaving by Lena Bergner. But rather than stress the proliferation of historical names and sources, perhaps the more
important point is surely the sculptural effect of the work: how a grid dissolves and melts into a net and then into almost a void, with simply the accents of the light giving it presence. Likewise, the low tables called Charlottes, and based on an incomplete Perriand design, become a very tactile ceramic surface in which to imprint the texture of a Mexican rush mat. It’s the radical changes of material that are interesting, as well as the often dramatic shifts of scale. These are very sculptural concerns.

The spareness makes us more aware of the floor that Antunes has made that covers the whole area. This is one of two new floors Antunes has made for the exhibition (the bamboo structures of the homemaker in her domain are placed on the first in the ground floor gallery). Both are based on designs for rugs by the British designer Marian Pepler, who worked for Gordon Russell Ltd in the 1930s, and had many of her rugs made by Edinburgh Weavers. The floors are translations of a design for a rug – made of tufted wool – into cork and lino. Antunes has frequently used these materials, using engraved cork from her native Portugal in combination with inlaid linoleum. These are natural materials much used in modernist design, valued for their cleanliness and efficiency.
Over the course of preparing for the exhibition, Antunes became interested in the house that architects Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight designed in 1938 for painter and then artistic director of Edinburgh Weavers Alistair Morton. The modernist house was at Brackenfell in Cumbria and included several cork floors.

Finally, the Warehouse space brings together many of Antunes’s hanging pieces that tumble from the ceiling to create a dense cluster. The space is given a thickness by the relationships that are set up by the very different materials used – from leather through to copper wire and rattan. Several artisanal and craft techniques are deployed, including those traditionally used in making bridles and saddles, as well as a new hanging piece made with the same technique as lassos. Many are knotted or looped in often complex configurations. In addition, Antunes has threaded rope between the beams and the floor, in effect weaving the whole space of the room together.