Leonor Antunes’ work resembles a stock-taking of the places where she lives and works. She makes precisely observed motifs and details into the basis for fragments - reproduced to-scale -, which she then separates from their function and context in order to develop them into her autonomous, filigree sculptures.

In Berlin, Antunes has been particularly interested in the doubling of many public buildings and institutions that existed in the once divided halves of the city. In each case, she selected the building that was constructed at a later date, and so chose an architectonic detail from the Academy of the Arts, the New National Gallery, the Museum of Applied Arts, the State Library and the Television Tower to serve as sources for her sculptural work.

In her own words, the artist is interested in details of architecture that reinforce the architectural structure of the building. The citations take on the form of geometric kits, whereby Antunes applies a so-called "Geometric Construction Apparatus", which was used as teaching material in geometry lessons during the 1950s and 60s. Autonomous reflections of the architectural environment that surrounds and influences us as everyday living space thus emerge through the conflicting fields of reproduction and transformation, scale-replica and de-functionalising.


Studio 2, 14th - 30th October 2005, Wednesday - Sunday, 2 - 7 pm, Opening: Thursday, 13th October 2005, 7 pm
 

In museums and exhibition spaces, entire professions work on the untouchable, inalterable qualities of art. But in his work, Benoît Goupy turns this defence of the status quo on its head. The material and media he employs are the generally undesired effects of human presence on the climatic conditions or of the background architecture on an exhibition space, and investigation into marginal faults in the architectural surroundings.

This art transforms the passive viewer into an active researcher; he becomes a protagonist concerned with the fragile balancing of aesthetic form. In the Künstlerhaus, Goupy will mount two parallel strips of ice onto the wall of the exhibition space, which are initially difficult to distinguish from the completely white surface of the wall. Only when the visitors sense, feel and touch the transient material do changes in temperature cause the art on the wall to shimmer, before it begins to gradually change as a result of the process of perception, making us aware of "the invisible physical forces", "which set us into permanent, but unconscious dialogue with our surroundings." (Benoît Goupy)

This exhibition is being presented by Valeria Schulte-Fischedick. It is the first of a series of exhibitions, under the motto “coup de foudre – at first glance”, for which various curators have been invited to select and present a single artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

www.deiska.nl/goupy

Studio 3 + 4, Facade, 14th - 30th October 2005, Wednesday - Sunday, 2 - 7 pm, Opening: Thursday, 13th October 2005, 7 pm