Curated by Douglas Fogle for the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles, Leonor Antunes: discrepancies with E.S. (in company) engages with the modernist domestic spatial configurations of Richard Neutra’s iconic home and studio. Responding to the unique architectural environment of Neutra’s iconic Los Angeles home and workspace, Antunes has made a sculptural intervention into this mid-century modern icon with a new body of work inspired by the designs of the Austrian émigré architect Elizabeth Scheu Close (1912-2011), an MIT-trained architect who brought modernist design to Minneapolis and whose family was part of the same Viennese social circles as the Neutras.
Antunes’s discrepancies with E.S. came about after she was invited to make an intervention in the Neutra VDL. As her research progressed, the artist came across the architectural work of Elizabeth Scheu Close and was fascinated by the story of her life. Born to a bourgeois Viennese family who travelled in the same circles as Richard Neutra, Scheu would grow up in a home designed by the pioneering Austrian modernist architect Adolf Loos that would become a meeting place for a wide variety of artists, intellectuals and socialites. Born to a Jewish mother, Scheu would flee Austria in 1932 and ended up as one of the few women to earn a degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Attempting to find work after graduating, she wrote to Richard Neutra asking if she could intern at his office in Los Angeles only to be told that this would be possible if she paid a monthly fee. Rejecting this condition, Scheu subsequently moved to Minneapolis where she became a champion of modernist design and built scores of homes and other structures. After reading this
story, Antunes decided to finally bring Scheu Close to the VDL to close the historical loop on yet another discrepancy.
For discrepancies with E.S. (in company), Antunes has populated the Neutra VDL with three different kinds of sculptures derived from measurements taken from furniture and architectural elements designed by Elizabeth Scheu Close.