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.

The artist Leonor Antunes (b. 1972, Lisbon) has described the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles as a meeting place or “reunion site.” Indeed, the iconic home and workplace of the Austrian-born architect Richard Neutra has been that and more over the last nine decades. Originally built in 1932 in the International Style and then rebuilt after a devasting fire in 1966 as what we now think of as an exemplar of classic Los Angeles mid-century modernism, the VDL played host to a wide array of eminent artists, architects, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other twentieth century cultural luminaries. As the newest guest in the long history of the VDL, Antunes was invited to make a sculptural intervention in this storied house. In her project discrepancies with E.S. (in company), Antunes has chosen to respond to both the history and the unique architectural environment of Neutra’s Los Angeles home and workspace with a new body of work referencing the designs of the Austrian émigré architect Elizabeth Scheu Close (1912-2011) (the “E.S.” of her title) as well as earlier sculptures derived from her interest in the Cuban-born designer Clara Porset (1895- 1981) and the French designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) (who form the “in company”).

Known for her ongoing dialogue with the history of twentieth century architecture, design and art, the Berlin-based Antunes holds a unique position as a gleaner, a bricoleur and an interlocutor of built forms. Intrigued by the formal qualities of the functional creations of a wide variety of modernist designers and architects–chairs, lamps, furniture and architectural elements—Antunes begins a conversation with these objects by taking measurements of their defining lines and shapes. The artist then transforms these gleaned design codes into abstracted geometric sculptures fashioned out of an array of industrial and more artisanal craft materials ranging from acrylic, brass and stainless steel to leather, cork, wood, rubber and rope. Far removed from the world of functional design, Antunes’s resulting works exhibit a kind of cultural half-life, quietly radiating the aura of their sources while being substantively transformed into something else—something almost organic—despite their inert materiality. Installed in groupings that hang from ceilings and walls, occupy floors, and generally redefine the spaces that they inhabit, Antunes deploys these objects to create environments that lie somewhere between immersive conclaves of abstracted entities and pieces of concrete poetry that employ physical, sculpted iterations of a design language as its utterances. It's this in-between character of her work that has led Antunes to often use the word “discrepancies” in her titles. In her formulation, discrepancies suggest both a conversation with the objects and designers with whom she engages as well as a set of differences—both an homage and a transformation.

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. In a group of five new sculptures, each titled Elizabeth (2025), stainless steel tension poles with rubber balls on their ends stand at attention in the VDL’s upstairs living room suspending abstracted cedar forms, some of which are laced with ropes that drape organically towards the floor. Derived from Scheu Close’s furniture designs for her modernist Skywater cabin which still sits perched on the hills above the St. Croix River in Minnesota, this forest of abstracted forms take on the character of ghostly cocktail guests in the VDL’s living room. Meanwhile in the VDL’s ground floor studio and its penthouse solarium, Antunes has created a series of modular curvilinear acrylic screens held together in the configurations by brass strips. Titled discrepancies with E.S., these works were inspired by measurements the artist took from an ad hoc Plexiglas intervention that the architect made into her self-designed home to prevent her children from falling down a curved staircase. Finally, in Antunes work skywater (2025), an almost anthropomorphic geometrically patterned black leather rectangle leans against the wall of the VDL’s ground floor studio while extending its length across the floor. Based on patterns of Scheu Close’s brick path designs for her cottage, this strangely organic form evokes the image of a visitor in repose. Indeed, Antunes’s entire installation at the Neutra VDL is very much about convening a conclave of visiting design ghosts. Alongside Elizabeth Scheu Close’s joyful and long delayed visit to Neutra’s home and studio are Antunes’s early sculptural meditations on the designs of Clara Porset (her teak wood and rope Clara series from 2018) and Charlotte Perriand (her glazed ceramic and lacquered wood Charlotte series from 2021). Each of these pioneering female designers bring with them their own discrepancies with the legacy of modernism. Antunes has channeled all three of them into a lively conversation throughout the spaces of the Neutra VDL that we are privileged to hear if only we can listen intently enough.

Douglas Fogle Independent curator, Los Angeles

Leonor Antunes was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1972, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal (2025); Fruitmarket, Scotland (2023); Serralves Foundation, Portugal (2022); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2020); MASP, São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2016); CAPC Bordeaux, France (2015); New Museum, New York, NY (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2013); and the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, (2011). Antunes represented the Portuguese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and has participated in the 58th and 57th Venice Biennale (2019 and 2017); the 12th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2015); and the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014).

Douglas Fogle is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles with over thirty years of experience as a museum curator focusing on exhibitions and publications devoted to contemporary art, film, architecture, fashion, and design. Some of his most recent exhibitions include Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (2025); Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser at Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium, co-curated with Hanneke Skerath (2022-23); and the traveling exhibition Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History at UCCA Edge, Shanghai (2022), Jeu de Paume, Paris, (2023), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2023), Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2024), and Taipei Museum of Fine Arts (2025); Fogle has held curatorial positions at a number of contemporary art institutions including Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, CO; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. As a writer he has contributed essays to numerous magazines, exhibition catalogues and artist monographs and recently co-authored and co-published Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (idajoon/MACK, 2025).

To say that Carol Robinson is a Franco-American composer and clarinetist is perhaps too restrictive to describe the eclecticism of her experience and passion. Whether performing repertoire or experimental forms, she appears in major venues and festivals the world over, working with musicians from a wide stylistic spectrum. Author of over one hundred works, recent compositions include commissions from the French Ministry of Culture, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Radio France and Brucknerhaus Linz. Beyond her own compositions, her discography includes award winning monographic recordings of music by Scelsi, Nono, Feldman, Berio, Radigue, Frey or Niblock, as well as classical music, jazz and alternative rock.

Originally constructed in 1932 and 1939 and then rebuilt after a fire in 1965, Richard Neutra’s VDL Studio and Residences in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles is an icon of mid-century modern architecture. Originally built with a no-interest loan from Dutch philanthropist Dr. CH Van Der Leeuw, this radical glass house and architecture studio became an important center of modernist design. In 2017 the Neutra VDL House was named a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Today the house is under the stewardship of the College of Environmental Design (ENV) and Department of Architecture (CPP ARC) at Cal Poly Pomona and is led by its Resident Director Noam Saragosti who also oversees its cultural and educational programming. The primary mission of the College with respect to VDL is: to use the house as an educational resource for ENV students and faculty, to preserve and maintain the property, to make the house accessible to visitors through tours given by Cal Poly Pomona architecture students, and to host arts and culture programs that will strengthen the facility's mission as a community resource. This project has been made possible by the generous support of Chara Schreyer. Additional support has been provided by Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.