NEW YORK, NY.- For her first solo exhibition in New York, Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes presents a new body of site-specific works in the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. Antunes creates sculptures that reflect the environment that surrounds them and make reference to the work of lesser-known figures from the history of twentieth century architecture and design. Her interest in craft and handwork shines through in her use of wood, bamboo, leather, brass, rope, and string; these materials often find sculptural form as vertical or horizontal demarcations in space or as woven, transparent nets and grids.

“Leonor Antunes: I Stand Like A Mirror Before You” reflects Antunes’s investment in a group of female artists and architects for whom New York became an important place for the production and presentation of their work. Working from measurements and proportions specific to the New Museum building, Antunes’s new sculptures refer to the vernacular principles that characterize the work of Swedish furniture designer and architect Greta Grossman. The installation also considers the American experimental filmmaker, choreographer, and writer Maya Deren’s thoughts on the transformative potential of cinema as a reflective surface. Antunes has created a densely choreographed series of hanging and standing works based on weavings by Anni Albers and Lenore Tawney that mirror one another and use the glass wall of the Lobby Gallery as a screen for reflection.

The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator, and is on view in the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery June 24–September 6, 2015. Leonor Antunes was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1972 and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Pérez Art Museum Miami (2014), Kunsthalle Basel (2013), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg (2012), Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2011), Reina Sofía, Madrid (2011), and Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2011). Her work has also been included in a number of international group exhibitions, including the 12th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2015), the 8th Berlin Biennial (2014), and the 3rd Singapore Biennial (2011), and has been exhibited in venues such as the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2014), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2014), CNEAI, Chatou, France (2013), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2011), and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2010). Antunes will be the subject of solo exhibitions at CAPC Bordeaux (2015), Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016), and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017).