At Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Joana Vasconcelos has turned a dialogue with Valentino Garavani into an argument for scale, craft and visibility. VENUS brings her monumental installations into conversation with more than 40 haute-couture and ready-to-wear creations, placing the work of the contemporary artist at the center rather than treating art as décor for fashion.
The exhibition originated with Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti in Rome and has been adapted for MAAT through a new architectural route. Its centerpiece, Valkyrie Venus, is an imposing textile sculpture made in 2025. New works sit beside Vasconcelos landmarks including Marilyn, the giant high-heeled shoes built from pots and saucepan lids; Garden of Eden, an immersive field of artificial flowers; and Independent Heart #3, made from plastic cutlery.
Domestic technique, public scale
Vasconcelos has long worked by enlarging materials and techniques associated with domestic or feminine labor. Crochet, needlework, fabric and ornament are not softened into private detail. They become architecture, spectacle and public presence.
In a new interview, the artist described her decision to bring domestic detail into monumental sculpture and rejected the expectation that women’s art must continually be defined through suffering. Her position is not a denial of pain. It is a demand that joy, excess, humor and grandeur also be recognized as intellectually serious forms of expression.
The Valentino pairing sharpens that idea because couture depends on labor that is simultaneously celebrated and hidden. The designer’s name carries cultural power, while the skilled hands behind embroidery, construction and finishing often remain anonymous. Vasconcelos makes that labor visible by changing its scale and giving it the spatial authority usually associated with industrial materials.
What artists can take from the exhibition
The project demonstrates how a collaboration can be built around genuine formal correspondence rather than surface branding. Vasconcelos and Valentino meet through color, ornament, textiles, handwork and the body. That shared language allows each field to retain its identity while producing something larger than a product display.
For artists considering partnerships with fashion or luxury houses, the useful question is not simply whether a brand offers visibility. It is whether the collaboration reveals something already central to the practice. Clear curatorial authorship, new work, institutional context and a coherent point of view are what separate a meaningful cultural project from a promotional activation.
The exhibition also provides a model for reaching broad audiences without making the work smaller or easier. Vasconcelos does not reduce her vocabulary to meet fashion halfway. She intensifies it. Scale becomes the bridge.
Joy as cultural force
At a moment when seriousness is often confused with restraint, VENUS argues that decoration can be rigorous and exuberance can carry historical weight. It also insists that forms of making coded as feminine or domestic deserve the same monumental space long granted to steel, stone and heroic abstraction.
VENUS – Valentino Garavani through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos is on view at MAAT in Lisbon through February 22, 2027.
