SÈTE.- the constant inequality of leonor’s days* is a new sculptural installation by Leonor Antunes (born in 1972 in Lisbon), spread across six rooms on the ground floor of the Crac Occitanie. For over twenty-five years, Leonor Antunes has been developing a body of work made up of sculptural suspensions that inhabit architectures, while offering a critical interpretation of the sites and their histories. At the Crac, visitors are invited to freely roam a forest of objects that combine the language of sculpture with those of decorative arts, costumes, and stage furniture, decompartmentalising the conventional categories of art, design, and architecture.


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the constant inequality of leonor’s days* is a readaptation of the exhibition presented in Lisbon. The title is followed by an asterisk indicating that it is a citation. Leonor Antunes borrows this title from a drawing by Portuguese artist, filmmaker, writer and poet Ana Hatherly (1929–2015). It contains Leonor Antunes’s first name, and the drawing was created in 1972, the year she was born, a biographical coincidence that reinforces her deep private connection with Hatherly. The latter’s drawing is a tangle of words, its density making the text almost unreadable. This becomes material for a relationship with language that is radically poetic and in motion. In Lisbon, alongside the installation of her works, Leonor Antunes curated an exhibition that she assembled from the CAM’s collection, presenting a selection of works dedicated exclusively to women artists, some of whose pieces were shown for the first time since their acquisition.


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the constant inequality of leonor’s days* drew inspiration from the CAM’s architecture. Opened in 1983, the building was designed by British architect Leslie Martin. Although his wife and collaborator Sadie Speight (1906–1996) contributed to the project, her name remained in the shadows. Yet she is a central figure of the UK’s modernist movement, as a forerunner in the critique of contemporary design in the 1940s. Architect, Sadie Speight also conceived design objects like rugs and tapestries, particularly in the context of architectural projects. According to Leonor Antunes: “Sadie Speight’s work, which had a strong presence in the CAM project, never got the recognition it deserved”. The research that Leonor Antunes conducted for her exhibition at the CAM enabled her to rediscover marginalised figures from the history of art and design.

In connection with the forty-some sculptures exhibited at the Crac (some of which make reference to Sadie Speight), Leonor Antunes presents a floating floor sculpture made from cork inlaid with brass and linoleum patterns. The enlarged sculpture, reproduces that of an original drawing for a single knotted rug by British designer Marian Pepler, who was close associate of Sadie Speight: through this gesture of citation and displacement, Leonor Antunes also restores Pepler to a central place.

In this project, presented in Lisbon and then in Sète, Leonor Antunes once again implements a method that interweaves references, citations, patterns, techniques and skills. By revisiting the history of 20th- and 21st- century design, Leonor Antunes offers a decentred approach to the established narratives of modernism, which are mostly male, heroic, linear, and not very inclusive. Tactfully using the symbolic power of the institutions that invite her to show her work, the artist brings the creations of other women artists back into circulation, as she accompanies and surrounds herself with the likes of Ana Hatherly, Franca Helg, Charlotte Perriand, Lina Bo Bardi, Marian Pepler, Sadie Speight, and Sophie Taeuber. A number of sculptures presented in the exhibition make direct reference to those artists, whose names or initials appear in the titles. The recurring presence of knots, meshes and nets reflects the care that Leonor Antunes puts into interlinking art figures, establishing new genealogies of affinity. These forms also draw from her interest in textile design, weaving, and a whole set of devalued techniques, often linked to crafts and so-called minor arts, as exemplified by a set of works made of wicker, leather, or glass beads. Similarly, the materials used to create the floor sculpture (cork, linoleum, brass) are relatively discredited and often associated with domestic spaces (and female sculpture by extension). But here, Leonor Antunes gives them a place that is both monumental and central, since that floor both structures and interlinks all of the spaces.

For the exhibition in Lisbon, Leonor Antunes produced a new series of wooden slatted panels, which serve as both sculptures and museographic devices. These panels were directly inspired by those that architect and designer Charlotte Perriand designed between 1966 and 1969 for the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Paris. Leonor Antunes uses them to present the work of other artists in the exhibition she curated at the CAM, but they also serve as a system for hanging her own works, reinforcing that permeability between sculpture and design which lies at the heart of her practice. Those wooden panels have the distinctive characteristic of being transparent while also concealing. They make possible a complex play of perspectives, and structure the space without constraining it.

Transparency and fluidity lie at the heart of her artistic practice, implemented over time. Her works allow the gaze to pass through them, as they engage in a dialogue with one another through an infinite network of relations and affinities that can be constantly reconfigured. In this, the artist drew from the heritage of two major figures of design and architecture, the Italian Franco Albini (1905–1977 ) and the Italian- Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992). Bo Bardi designed one of Brazil’s largest museums, the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), in which she devised revolutionary principles of display, making it possible for the eyes to embrace a multitude of works. By decompartmentalising perceptions and spaces, it becomes possible to weave new links and build new narratives. In both Lisbon and Sète, there is no imposed path through the exhibition. Everyone is free to drift wherever their eyes lead them, in an intuitive, fluid, egalitarian relationship with the space.

Leonor Antunes was born in 1972 in Lisbon. She lives and works between Berlin and Lisbon.

Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her work, at such institutions as La Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland (2023), the Fundação de Serralves in Porto, Portugal (2022), the Mudam Luxembourg (2020), the MASP in São Paulo, Brazil (2019), the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2018), the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Italy (2018), the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2017), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016), the Capc in Bordeaux (2015), the New Museum in New York (2015), Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2013), and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2011). Leonor Antunes represented the Portuguese Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She took part in the Venice Biennale in 2019 and 2017, the Sharjah Biennial in 2015, and the Berlin Biennale in 2015.

She is represented by Marianne Goodman Gallery in Paris, Air de Paris gallery in Romainville, Paris, Luisa Strina gallery in São Paulo, Kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico City and New York, and Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo.



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