Leonor Antunes

Leonor Antunes was born in 1972 in Lisbon, Portugal, and lives and works in Berlin. She began her studies with a single year in the scenography program at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon, from 1992 to 1993, before completing a Licenciatura in Visual Arts, Sculpture, at the Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, between 1993 and 1998. In 1998 she undertook a further period of study at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Her sculptural practice draws on twentieth-century architecture and design, frequently recovering and reworking the ideas of women modernists whose contributions were marginalized in canonical art history. Working in rope, brass, leather, rubber, and wood, she builds installations calibrated to the specific dimensions and history of each exhibition space. She received the Premio Novos Artistas Fundacao EDP in Lisbon in 2001, and in 2018 was awarded the Zurich Art Prize by Museum Haus Konstruktiv, a prize reported at USD 100,000 (one institutional CV dates the award to 2019, a discrepancy not resolved across sources). In 2019 she represented Portugal at the Portuguese Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, following her participation in the central Viva Arte Viva exhibition at the 2017 Biennale.

SFMOMA curator Jenny Gheith has written about Antunes's engagement with historical figures on the occasion of the artist's 2016 installation "a spiral staircase leads down the garden." Reception has not been uniformly admiring: New York Times critic Martha Schwendener has offered a more skeptical reading of the work. Between these positions sits the more common critical read: that Antunes's forms function as a kind of embodied research, translating the measurements and material vocabularies of modernist architects and designers, many of them women, into sculpture that asks to be read historically as much as formally.

Antunes's market runs almost entirely through the primary market. She is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, kurimanzutto, Air de Paris, Galeria Luisa Strina, and Taka Ishii Gallery, with recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions at each through 2026. No verified auction sale for her work could be confirmed across major auction-market sources as of this writing; her installations are often large, site-specific, and made from perishable or non-precious materials, which likely limits how much of her output reaches the secondary market at all.

There is no confirmed auction record for Leonor Antunes and no published catalogue raisonne, so anyone evaluating her work is working from primary-market and institutional evidence rather than price history. Her museum footprint, spanning SFMOMA, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, MASP, MUDAM, and a national pavilion at Venice, is unusually strong for an artist without an established secondary market, which makes gallery relationships and exhibition history the most reliable signals of standing. Buyers should also take care with identity: at least one other, unrelated artist shares a very similar name, and should not be confused with the Berlin-based sculptor profiled here.